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APA Style Guide: Home

NLC's guide to APA formatting, citations, and references

APA Style

What is APA?

APA stands for the American Psychological Association--an organization for professionals in psychology. APA style is a set of rules commonly used for formatting assignments and citing references in psychology, sociology, health sciences, and other courses in the sciences. 

 

Right now, the APA manual is on its 7th edition. This means that the formatting within APA style has been updated 6 times and is thus on its 7th version. Most citation styles update every few years, so make sure you are always using the most recent edition.

Formatting

This guide is based on the APA handbook (7th ed),
published 2019.

 

For an electronic or physical copy of the manual, go to www.apastyle.apa.org

 

In-Text Citations

Just like any other citation style, APA style consists of 3 components:

  • general formatting
  • in-text citations
  • works cited page

Continue in this guide to learn about NLC's expectations for each component.

Sample Paper

To view an example of what an entire APA paper should look like, visit NLC's Writing Centre in Brightspace here.