Research papers are a significant part of your academic life, whether undertaking undergraduate or graduate studies. They also form a part of your academic projects, usually towards the end of the studies or regular assessments. An integral part of succeeding in your research papers is properly formatting them, and one of the best and most used formatting guidelines is the APA Style.
What is the APA Style?
The American Psychological Association developed the APA style to provide formatting guidance when writing higher education and professional research papers. The style provides writers with an easier way to organize ideas and arguments and easier readability and comprehension for readers. It also prevents issues like accidental plagiarism through in-text citations and a bibliography of references.
Knowing how to use the APA format is integral for success, though when in doubt or pressed for time, you can buy APA research paper from professional writing services. The current style in use is the 7th Edition, and it comes with several changes and improvements which aim to make the style easier to use.
While there is plenty about the style, including the new changes, the following tips should start you off by covering the main elements of the APA style.
Margin and spacing requirements
The APA style uses the standard paper size 8.5 x 11 inches and has one-inch margins on all four sides. The text is also double spaced, and the font used should be easily readable as the new rules are a bit lenient on fonts but require you to be consistent with the font used. Generally, Times New Roman font size 12 is used, and it should be your choice unless your professor states otherwise.
Title Page
The latest APA Edition has different research paper formats for students and professionals. As a student, your title page will have;
- The title of the paper
- Author’s name
- Institutional affiliation
- Course name and number
- The name of the instructor
- The assignment’s due date
The paper’s title should be concise without any unnecessary words or abbreviations. It should be one to two lines long, and you can have both uppercase and lowercase letters. You should center and boldface the title and then ensure everything on the title page is double spaced. If you are writing a professional paper, you follow with your institutional affiliation and the location where you conducted the research after the paper’s title. Then you have an author’s note which has a couple of paragraphs.
The first paragraph has your name and ORCID ID should you have one. The second paragraph contains information on any deaths of authors or any changes in affiliation. The third paragraph has acknowledgments and any disclosures you want to make.
Running Header
The 7th Edition also makes changes in the running head. First, student papers do not need a running head, but professional papers do. The Edition also does away with the running head label. The running head should not be more than 50 characters with space and punctuation included in the count. It is also all uppercase, and in both professional and student papers, the header’s page number is flush right.
Abstract
The abstract comes immediately after the Title Page and serves as a summary of the whole paper. It is an essential part of the research paper as it is the first thing readers encounter that tells them what the paper is about and what to expect. You write the abstract on its page titled abstract and the title centered. The abstract is written in a block format as a single paragraph and should be between 150 to 200 words.
The Body
The body of your APA research paper will follow the typical outline of most prose pieces with an introduction, body, and conclusion. The body uses indented paragraphs. The introduction is written after the title of the paper, but its paragraph is not labeled. All other main headings are centered and in boldface. After the introduction, the Method section follows that can contain subsections like Participants, Materials/Apparatus, Procedure sections. You label the subsections in boldface and flush left the titles.
The next part is the Results section which is then followed by the Discussion section. Towards the end of the discussion section, you can have the limitations and direction for future study subsection. Your last paragraph will serve as the paper’s conclusion and will reiterate the importance of your study. This outline is primarily for scientific research papers. Qualitative review papers will have a different format, including Literature Review, where the Methods and Results sections are.
Reference Page
The reference page has a list of all sources used in the paper. It is on its page titled References, with the title centered at the top of the page. The first line of each reference is flush left, and the rest of the lines are indented. The references appear in alphabetical order and are double spaced. Further rules guide the in-text citations and the listing of the references by author, source, date, and publisher, among other things.
These tips cover the basics and help you know what to look for when formatting your paper according to the APA style. Proper formatting gives you academic credibility.