by
Augie Morado
The 7th
edition of the APA Publication Manual is now available! As promised in my
previous blog post, I will now take a closer look at major changes made to the
7th edition from the 6th.
 |
| Pictured left to right: 6th ed. APA, 7th ed. APA. The future is now! |
At a first glance,
it seems as though most changes in the 7th edition have been made to
streamline the documentation process by removing redundant steps where
necessary. For graduate students submitting theses and dissertations here at
NIU, a few things will change regarding citation and style, although the Guidelines
for Preparing a Thesis
and Dissertation
still contain our default requirements for format.
In-Text Citation
For all sources with three or
more authors, use the first author’s name and et al. for each citation in the body
of your paper. Previously, the rule was to list each name for 3-5 authors the
first time and et al. for each time after (p. 266).
Additionally, those in
anthropology, the social sciences, and related fields may find useful the added
guidelines on citing Traditional Knowledge or Oral Traditions of Native Peoples
(p. 260).
Aside from these changes, the
basic rules of APA in-text citation remain the same as in the sixth edition:
Name and Year are needed for paraphrases, and page number should be added for
direct quotes as well.
References
One major
change to the reference page involves the use digital object identifiers (DOIs),
which should now be formatted as URLs (https://doi.org/###)
as opposed to being prefaced with the label “DOI:”, as was the case in the 6th
edition.
Additionally,
up to 20 authors' last names and initials should be included in a reference. The
previous limit was eight.
For book
citations, the location of the publisher is no longer needed, similar to 8th
edition MLA format.
For website
citations, the preface “Retrieved from” is no longer needed before the URL.
For ebook
citations, the format or platform in brackets (e.g., [ebook] or [Kindle]) should
be omitted.
Bias-Free and Inclusive Language
Notably, the 7th
edition endorses the singular use of the “they” for cases in which a person’s gender
is unknown. Previously, the APA endorsed the singular “they” strictly for cases
in which it is a person’s preferred pronoun. For more information, please see my colleague Tiffany's recent post on the subject.
Style
When referring to linguistic
examples, use quotation marks rather than italics (e.g., The search terms “fox”
and “hound” were used to narrow our results.).
For those in biology and
chemistry, the 7th ed. offers expanded guidance on abbreviating the names
of chemical compounds, genes, and proteins (p.177).
Finally, use only one space after a sentence.
Format
Furthermore, there are additional
changes regarding format, such as the removal of the phrase “Running head” from
the title page of a journal article submission and the complete removal of the running
head from student papers (i.e., only the page number is needed in this latter
case).
But as stated before, please
default to the Thesis and Dissertation Office’s guidelines on formatting your
project. We will be happy to help you work through format differences between
the two styles, so please drop by and visit Mon-Thurs from 10 am – 2 pm!
Finally, if we haven’t mentioned this
already, you are free to continue using either the 6thAPA for the foreseeable future as your advisors, and we adjust to
the new format.
