Most psychology journal articles (and many other works across the social sciences) use citation formatting from the 7th Edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual (APA 7). In addition to standardized formatting for in-text citations and reference lists, APA 7 provides extensive documentation for how to style both professional and student papers for things like cover pages, heading levels, and figure/table formatting. The citation style is very widely used and strictly required by many journals. The other style guidelines are less frequently strict requirements, but are valuable standards for keeping papers accessible and readable.
This document includes the bare-bones basics of APA 7. These guidelines are those you’re likely to need in nearly every paper. These should get you pretty far, but they are really just the beginning. There are guidelines for just about every aspect of formatting you might come across, so you’ll need to do some independent work finding the rules you need beyond these basics.
The most comprehensive guide to working with APA formatting and style guidelines is available from Purdue University: the Purdue OWL. This guide is geared toward student researchers and offers plain-English explanations for just about any question you may have. Additionally, all the official information about APA Style and the full manual can be found on the APA’s website.
Note that these guidelines are based on the 7th edition of APA style, first published in 2019 and currently in use as of 2026. Many resources online will still refer to APA6 style, and many of the guidelines are unchanged, so it’s always worth double checking which version’s documentation you’re looking at.
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It doesn’t matter who you are, it matters what the paper is. If you are producing original research (including proposals), you should use professional style. If you are writing a paper as a class assignment that exists only for the purposes of that assignment (i.e., it’s not going to become a proposal/thesis), you should use student style.
Defer to your advisor or professor if they tell you otherwise.
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A general note for writing class papers: Never refer to class readings (or lecture) in a way that’s contextually dependent on being in that class. Imagine someone at another university picking up your paper five years from now. Can they understand which papers you’re referencing? If you’ve used the word “the” in your reference you’re probably not citing it correctly. Here’s a list of ways you should not refer to course materials in your papers:
In-text citations come in two flavors:
In-text citations do not differ based on type of work, meaning (Smith, 2020) could refer to a book, article, movie, memo, tweet, etc.
The basic format for in-text signal phrases is:
In their study, Authors (Year) found that the sky is blue.
The signal phrase refers to the publications author and year but not the title. The only time you might choose to include the title as well as author is when referencing whole books, films, or other “long” works: “Plato introduces the Allegory of the Cave in The Republic.” or “Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) set the tone for the era’s horror genre.”
The basic format for in-text citations is: