Changes to APA Format, 6th to 7th Edition, Part II

by Augie Morado

The 7^th 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 7^th edition from the 6^th.

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 7^th 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 6^th 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 8^th 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 7^th 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 7^th 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 6^thAPA for the foreseeable future as your advisors, and we adjust to the new format.