APA style (American Psychological Association style) is a writing style and format for academic documents such as scholarly journal articles and books. It is commonly used for citing sources within the field of behavioral and social sciences, including sociology, education, nursing, psychology, anthropology, and business management. APA style provides a foundation for effective scholarly communication because it helps writers present their ideas in a clear, precise, and inclusive manner. The current edition is the seventh revision.
A typical APA-style research paper fulfills three levels of specification:
- Level 1: Organizing the research paper by including a title page, an abstract, an introduction, the methodology, the results, a discussion, and references. In addition, formatting of abstracts and title pages must be as per the APA manual of style.
- Level 2: Specifying the style of writing. It must be clear and formal without slang, pop culture references, biased language, and humor.
- Level 3: Citing sources within the research paper using in-text citations and the reference page. In-text citations will use the authors name and the date within the research paper. These citations will refer back to the reference page at the end, which lists all the sources that you may have used in your research paper.
APA style is widely used, either entirely or with modifications, by hundreds of other scientific journals (including medical and other public health journals), in many textbooks, and in academia (for papers written in classes) .
