APA 7 Citation Style: APA 7

What is APA?

APA stands for the American Psychological Association.  According to the APA website, "APA is the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 115,700 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students as its members" (http://www.apa.org/about/index.aspx).  

(https://www.library.ahu.edu/news/apa-style-central)

APA Style

APA style is a method of documenting resources in academic writing within scientific writing, which includes the fields of all sciences, including social sciences such as psychology, sociology, education, and criminal justice.  As with MLA, "APA style consists of rules or guidelines that a publisher observes to ensure clear and consistent presentation of written material"  (http://www.apastyle.org).  Using APA style applies to not only how you write, but also how  you cite and how you format your paper.  

 Why APA?

This question applies to any citation style.  Why do we need citations?   

When asked why you should cite your sources, many students reply, "So you don't get accused of plagiarizing." It is true that you must provide citations crediting others' work so as to avoid plagiarism, but scholars use citations for many reasons:

• To make your arguments more credible. You want to use the very best evidence to support your claims. For example, if you are citing a statistic about a disease, you should use a reputable source like the World Health Organization or Centers for Disease Control (CDC). When you tell your reader the statistic comes from such a source, she will know to trust it- and thereby trust your argument more.

• To show you've done your homework. You want to make it clear to your audience that you've researched your subject and know what you are talking about. As you dive deeper into your research, you will probably find certain authors are experts on the topic and are mentioned in most of the articles and books. You should read these experts' works and incorporate them into your paper.

• To build a foundation for your paper. Great breakthroughs in scholarship are accomplished by building on the earlier, groundbreaking work of others. For example, Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation would not have been possible without Johannes Kepler's law of planetary motion. What articles, books, texts, etc inspired you to create your argument? You want to provide references to the works which led to your thesis.

• To allow your readers to find the sources for themselves. Someone interested in your topic may be inspired to read some of the articles and other sources you used to write your paper. The citation within the paper tells them what part of your argument is best addressed by a particular source, and the full citation in the bibliography provides them with the information needed to locate the original work.

  (This information has been politely borrowed from Radford University's McConnell Library)

WCCC's Policy on Academic Conduct

The following is part of the Student Rights, Responsibilities and Academic Conduct policy at WCCC:

Students have an obligation to conduct their academic activities honestly and conscientiously. They should give appropriate recognition by name for their contributions to published material. Each course syllabus will contain the institutional policy on plagiarism.

In addition, they shall not:

• Present as their own academic work ideas or work of another person without proper acknowledgment of sources.

Violation of these rules can lead to a failure for a course and/or expulsion from the College.

Title Capitalization Tool -- Making title capitalization easy. Automatically capitalize and case convert to Title Case (in AP, APA, Chicago, MLA), sentence case, UPPERCASE, lowercase, and more. 

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The References list must start on a new page at the end of your paper and should be double spaced. Center the title “References” at the top of the paper without the quotation marks and with no underlining or bolded text.

Alphabetize all types of sources in one list by the first word of the citation (other than the, a, or an).

For long works such as books or journals, titles must be italicized. The titles of shorter works such as journal articles or essays should not be italicized, underlined, or put in quotes. 

Include only those sources that you cited in the text of your paper.

Capitalize all major words in journal titles. For all other titles (books, journal articles, and web pages), capitalize only the first letter of the first word in the title and subtitle, the first word after any punctuation, and proper names.

When preparing your Reference page, you must double space all entries and use the hanging indent. 

For in-text citations (parenthetical ciations), place the citation at the end of the sentence(s) where the source is used. Place the sentence’s end punctuation after the final parenthesis.

When writing the text of your paper, there should only be one space after periods or other punctuation that ends a sentence.

When citing a source with more than three authors, for the in-text citation include the first author’s last name followed with et al. For example: (Smith et al., 2020).  However, on the reference list, list all authors.