The American Psychological Association originally created a publication manual to provide a common structure for all journal manuscripts in the area of the social sciences.
Many other disciplines (including psychology, the behavioral sciences, nursing, personnel administration and many areas within education) have adopted this as their professional writing standard as well.
In an academic environment, you will often be expected to conform to this standard when writing. At this point, you should be mostly concerned with creating an accurate reference list using proper format and providing citations within the text to give credit for an idea or concept to the source from which you got it.
Remember that, with APA, capitalization, italicization, and punctuation are crucial components of citation. Check your citations against the APA Style Manual for these small, but important, details.
Important Note: There is a new citation format for articles found online (APA Style Guide to Electronic References, 2007). The biggest change is including the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) at the end of the citation instead of: Retrieved on date from name of database. A link to this resource is below.
If there is no DOI listed (look on the item record and the first & last page of the article), replace that with Retrieved from name of database.
For assistance with citations, proofreading, and more visit an NSU Writing Center Location:
You can visit the Citation Station on the 2nd floor of the John Vaughan Library in Tahlequah anytime to see a sample paper and checkout related citation resources.
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association by 