APA formatting guidelines for fonts, margins, and references

¶ … American Psychological Association (APA) style of formatting is used very predominantly for citing sources in the social and behavioral sciences (A complete resource, 2010). The most recent version of this formatting style is the 6th edition. This format style covers multiple aspects of writing a research paper from the title page to the references. The intent of style formatting is to ensure that all research papers conform to a rigorously manner of producing and publishing scientific work. This paper will relate first to general guide lines for writing a paper using the APA style; then discuss specific elements of style as it relates to in text citation and references will be discussed.

When producing work using the APA style there are some general guidelines that govern the format of the work. Many of these guidelines are also found in other styles of formatting and as such they may even be considered as ubiquitous cutting across all disciplines. Written work produced using the APA style should be typed double spaced using paper that is standard sized; which is defined as 8.5" x 11" with a 1" margin on all sides (Angeli, 2010). The acceptable font size for APA formatted writing is 10-12 point and Times New Roman or a similar serif font may be used, very often the alternative font is the Ariel font (Scott, 2009).

In addition to those guidelines, paragraphs have a 0.5" indentation at the beginning of the paragraph, a notable exception to this rule is the abstract which is never indented (Scribe, 2010). Each page of the paper should be numbered using Arabic numerals; the numbers are to be placed flush right in the upper right hand corner of the page. The numbers are part of the page header that also includes, the title of the paper, placed flush left in the header.

Research papers written using the APA style generally have the following sections, a title page, an abstract, an introduction, method, results, discussion, references and appendices (A complete reference, 2010). For each section of the research paper there are also specific guidelines governing the formatting of that section. However for simpler papers fewer sections are utilized, and may only have a title page, abstract, main body and references (Angeli, 2010). The title page of the paper should have the title of the paper, the name of the person authoring the work and the institution to which the author must submit the work. The title should be limited to 12 words and every attempt should be made to omit superfluous words from the title. The title is centered on the page and the author's name is place below the title.

The abstract is placed on a new page and on the first line of that page the word "Abstract" should be written. On the next line the abstract begins, it is a summary of the work, identifying key points within the research. The abstract is not indented. The abstract is usually limited to between 150-250 words (Khan, 2010). At the end of the abstract the author may include a list of key words. These are words that allow the work to be easily found in a database. The list of key words is italicized.

The introduction, method, results, and discussion section of the paper constitute the main body of the work and are formatted in accordance with the general guidelines for formatting an APA paper. Proper citation ensures that writes avoid plagiarism and give credit to the source from which the idea, thought, diagram or quotation is drawn. This is accomplished through in-text citation and references.

In-text citation requires that firstly, the author make use of the past tense when citing previous work (Angeli, 2010). The APA format makes use of the "author-date" method to correctly cite the work of other authors. This method calls for the author's last name and the date of publication to be placed in the text of the work, and a complete reference for that author is placed in a last section entitled references. This approach is necessary for ideas and concepts from other authors. Short quotes require that in addition to the author and date, the page from which the quote is taken should be included in parenthesis. The page number is preceded by p. "If the author is not named in a signal phrase, place the author's last name, the year of publication, and the page number in parentheses after the quotation" (Angeli, 2010, par. 6). Quotations that are longer than 40 words should be placed in a block of text without quotations marks. The quote is started on a new line and indented 5 spaces. The citation is placed at the end of the final punctuation mark of the block quote.