Introduction

Peer Review: The Guardian of Quality

Impact Factor: A Metric for Journal Prestige

Open Access: Breaking Down Paywalls

Conclusion

The style of the American Psychological Association (APA) is one of the most widely used across academia, particularly in the social sciences, psychology, education, and related fields. Many top-ranked business and management journals also use APA. The style covers citation and referencing; paper structure; formatting of headings, tables, and other document elements; and so on. This blog post outlines the key elements of APA style—though it should be noted that many journals (e.g., those published by the Academy of Management) use their own style based on APA.

The Basics of APA Style

1. Title Page: The title page includes—you guessed it—the title of the paper, the author name(s), the institutional affiliation, and a running head. The running head is a short version of the paper’s title and is also included on each subsequent pages in the header section of the document.
2. Abstract: The abstract summarizes the paper’s main points, including the research objectives, methodology or approach, results, and conclusions. It typically ranges from 100 to 250 words.
3. In-text citations: APA style uses an author–date citation system. This means that when sources are cited within the text, the author’s last name and the publication year are included in parentheses—for example, “(Smith, 2023)” or “Smith (2023)” (depending on the sentence structure). Page numbers should also be included when using a direct quotation—so “(Smith, 2020, p. 45).”
4. References: The reference list should include all sources cited in the paper (and none that are not directly cited). The information to be included varies according to the publication type, but, broadly speaking, each entry includes the author’s name, publication year, title, and publication information (e.g., journal title, and volume, issue, and page numbers for journal entries; or publisher for books). The reference page is organized alphabetically by the author’s last name.
5. Headings: APA style employs a hierarchical system of headings to organize content, ranging from level 1 (main section headings) to level 5 (subheadings). This aids in presenting a clear structure and enhancing the readability of the document.
6. Font and formatting: APA recommends using a clear and legible font, such as Times New Roman, with 12 pt. font size. Double-spacing should be used throughout the paper, including the title page, abstract, main text, and references.

Why APA Style Matters

Consistency: APA provides a standardized format for citations and references, ensuring that your sources are attributed correctly and uniformly. It also provide recommendations on spellings and word presentation (e.g., use of hyphens, capitalization). This consistency lends credibility to your work, allows readers to easily locate and verify the sources you’ve used, and ensures your work conforms to academic standards.

Clarity: The structured organization of APA style, including headings and subheadings, enhances the clarity of your writing. It helps readers follow your arguments and navigate through complex topics.

Academic integrity: Properly citing sources is a matter of academic integrity. APA style emphasizes giving credit to the original authors and researchers, preventing plagiarism and upholding ethical writing practices. APA also provide recommendations on language use (e.g., avoiding the use of “minorities” to describe people of color and other underrepresented groups), which can help you avoid using outdated terminology.

Professionalism: When you apply APA style to your writing, you demonstrate a commitment to professionalism and scholarly rigor. This is especially important in academic and professional contexts where adherence to standards is highly valued.

Mastering the intricacies of APA style is a valuable skill for any writer engaged in academic or research-oriented work. It is used by some of the highest-ranked journals, and its guidelines provide a structure that promotes clarity, consistency, and proper attribution of sources.

And remember, if you’re in any doubt, we can help. Our editors are experts in applying APA style in particular, and are up to date on all the changes brought in with the seventh edition. Plus, application of style guidelines is included in all orders—just provide the name of your journal or a relevant link or style document when you send your work over, and we’ll make sure your work is compliant.

For a PhD candidate, little is more daunting than choosing a topic for your dissertation. After all, it will shape the kind of research you’ll be doing over the next four-plus years of your life. And not only will your dissertation take up a lot of time and energy—it may also have a strong influence on whether you get hired down the road.

Choosing the right dissertation topic is vital to get the most of your PhD experience and to best serve your career. Here are five steps to ensure you’re on the right track.

1. Make sure the topic matches your career goals

No matter how well-crafted and compelling your dissertation is, it’s going to be of little value to you it doesn’t match up with your career goals. Make sure that you choose a topic that you want to continue researching in the future and that’s within the field you want to teach.

It’s also not a bad idea to tailor your topic to the market. Ideally, you’ll be defending your dissertation with plenty of prestigious journal publications under your belt already––plus, focusing on a current, relevant topic will make it easier to find grants to fund your research throughout your PhD and beyond.

2. Choose a topic that’s just right

Many PhD candidates struggle with fine-tuning the scope of their dissertation topic. It should be neither too broad nor too narrow, but just right––a tricky balance to strike. Most often, academics fall into this trap of either broadness or narrowness: while some fail to pinpoint a specific topic and end up floundering in the vastness of their research, others overcorrect, narrowing down their focus until they’ve missed the big picture altogether.

While your topic certainly needs to be specific, remember that a robust dissertation subject also needs a bit of breathing room and some space for growth and flexibility. This is especially true in the early stages of researching and writing, when your topic is still liable to fluctuate and change.

3. Double-check that the research is feasible

Before you commit to a research topic, it’s important to ensure that it’s actually feasible in terms of budget, resources, and scope. How many research participants can you really expect to find? Does your budget better accommodate quantitative or qualitative data? Given your time constraints, does it make sense to conduct a longitudinal study, or would a cross-sectional study be more practical? Will you have the resources to travel, or should you keep it local? Don’t set your heart on a project that simply won’t be possible to execute.

You also need to be realistic about your own knowledge and expertise, since you’re not going to have time to learn a new skill on the job. For example, you may be itching to study Medieval manuscripts in your dissertation––but if you aren’t fluent in Middle English, you should likely consider a different field of study. 

4. Listen to your supervisor’s advice

Your supervisor is an invaluable resource when choosing your PhD topic. Not only can they give you useful tips about the job market and resources available in your field, they can also help you assess where your topic stands with respect to the three items above (career, scope, and feasibility).

Even if you don’t like what your supervisor has to say, it’s a good idea to hear them out. Chances are they’ve seen a lot of dissertations in their time and know what separates the success stories from the flops.

5. Study something you’re genuinely interested in

While choosing a dissertation topic can be stressful, the good news is that if you do it right, you can spend four-plus years studying what you genuinely love.

In fact, not only can you choose a topic you’re passionate about, it’s actually in your best interests to do exactly that. After all, if you truly care about your work, you’re more likely to go above and beyond to ensure that it’s thoroughly researched, clearly communicated, and carefully polished––and, ultimately, to produce a successful dissertation.

Over the last few decades there’s been a spike in predatory academic journals. These journals often accept every article submitted to them as long as the author can pay the exorbitant publication fee—which the journal takes without offering peer review or other services in exchange. The sole aim of predatory journals is to make a profit, which they do by preying on unsuspecting academics. As PhD programs grow increasingly competitive, students become easier targets; many are desperate for publication and will gratefully publish their work anywhere that will accept it.

Until recently, emerging scholars could deduce which journals were legitimate and which were scams using Beall’s List. Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, curated and maintained this list of predatory open-access publishers for nearly a decade before shutting it down in 2017 due to frequent complaints and defamation suits. Interested or concerned academics can still access an archived version of Beall’s List, but it is no longer being updated.

There remain many useful resources that can help guide academics toward reputable journals, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals. Here are four more tips on how to steer clear of predatory publications when trying to find a home for your paper.

1. Pricey publication fees

One of the quickest ways to spot a predatory journal is by its gratuitous publication fee. Predatory journals are more interested in taking your money than in publishing valuable information. While many journals do charge legitimate publication fees in order to keep articles open access or to fund expensive peer review and article preparation processes, journals that do not offer these services—meaning that they are not open-access or don’t review your work—charge this fee for the sole reason of making a profit. Journals that ask for unreasonably high publication fees are thus unlikely to be reputable.

Another red flag is if the journal requires you to pay a submission fee. Most journals that charge a publication fee only ask for this after your paper has been accepted, pending revision and peer review. If you have to pay just to submit a paper, it’s probably not worth the cost.

2. Unprofessional presentation

Usually, you can tell intuitively if an academic journal is a scam. You’re best off avoiding journals with clear grammatical errors, typos, or inconsistent formatting, as well as those with unprofessional websites. If the journal’s appearance isn’t up to par, chances are that its editorial standards fall short as well.

3. Unlisted or small editorial board

Avoid journals that obscure or omit information regarding their editorial board. Reputable scholarly journals should have a large editorial board composed of respected academics, as well as a transparent editing process. Moreover, you likely want to know who will be reviewing, editing, and overseeing the publication of your paper—after all, you worked hard on it. A reputable journal has nothing to hide, so if you can’t find any information on, say, a journal’s editor-in-chief, take that as a clear warning sign that it might not be a trustworthy publication.

4. Misleading location

Often, predatory journals deliberately mislead readers as to where they are based. For example, many such journals use words such as “American” or “international” in their titles to add a sense of prestige, even if their headquarters are not in America, or if they aren’t international publications. Check where the journal is based before you submit your work and ensure that their branding reflects their true location. Again, good journals should have nothing to hide.

Whenever the American Psychological Association (APA) introduces a new edition of its publication manual, the new version usually includes several important changes to the style standards. This post covers some of the most significant updates introduced in the 7th edition of the APA style guide.

Referencing Standards

Changes to citation style in APA 7 mainly relate to simplifying citations and making online sources easier to cite. The main changes are as follows:

Publisher locations should no longer be included in the reference list for book entries.

Previously, references to books had to include both the publisher location and publisher name (e.g., “Washington, DC: American Psychological Association”). Now, only the publisher name should be included (e.g., “American Psychological Association”). For references where the publisher and author are the same, the publisher name is simply omitted from the citation.

DOIs and URLs are now presented differently.

Both are now included as hyperlinks in references and DOIs no longer need to be preceded by the label “DOI.” The label “Retrieved from” is now only used before URLs when a retrieval date is necessary—otherwise, the URL follows the period after the page title or page name (e.g., Howe, J. (2006, June 1). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds).

Use of “et al.” has changed.

Previously, APA stipulated that in-text citations for up to five authors should include all author surnames, with “et al.” used in subsequent citations of the same work. In APA 7, “et al.” is used for all instances of citations with three or more authors, even at first mention.

In the reference list, if a source has 20 or fewer authors the surnames and initials of all of these authors should be included in the full reference. For sources with 21 or more authors, the first 19 authors should be listed, followed by an ellipsis, and then the final author’s surname and initial(s) (e.g. “Wiskunde, B., Arslan, M., Fischer, P., Nowak, L., Van den Berg, O., Coetzee, L., Juárez, U., Riyaziyyat, E., Wang, C., Zhang, I., Li, P., Yang, R., Kumar, B., Xu, A., Martinez, R., McIntosh, V., Ibáñez, L. M., Mäkinen, G., Virtanen, E., . . . Kovács, A. (2019). Indie pop rocks mathematics: Twenty One Pilots, Nicolas Bourbaki, and the empty set. Journal of Improbable Mathematics, 27(1), 1935–1968. https://doi.org/10.0000/3mp7y-537”).

Inclusive and Bias-Free Language

APA 7 provides new guidelines regarding writing in a way that is inclusive and respectful of all people, regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, and racial and ethnic identity. For example, the APA now endorses the singular “they,” which is a gender-neutral pronoun (e.g., “A writer’s career might be influenced by how much they read,” rather than “…how much he or she reads,” “how much he reads,” etc.).

APA 7 also recommends sensitivity when applying labels and using descriptive phrases or adjectival forms over adjectives as labels. For example, the 7th edition endorses using the phrase “people living in poverty” instead of “the poor” (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 133). If you are interested in learning more, chapter 5 of the APA 7th edition provides extensive examples of and recommendations for using inclusive and bias-free language.

For more details on the above changes, or to read about all changes, you can check out this handy document published by the APA. And if you are feeling overwhelmed by trying to keep track of these new standards, our editors can help. We our experts in applying whichever version of APA (or other style) is required by your school or journal, so you can spend time writing and leave the style points to us.

Work Cited and Consulted:

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.).