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APA Citation Guide (APA 7th Edition)

What is APA Style?

APA Style was created by the American Psychological Association. It is a set of rules for formatting publications, including research papers. The formatting guidelines include specific rules for citing sources of information. The citations are in two parts: in-text citations in the body of your paper and full citations in the References list at the end of your paper.

Sample Papers, Templates, and Checklists

Margins: Add 1 inch margins on all sides.

Header: Starting with your title page, add page numbers at the top right corner of the page. 

Line Spacing: Double-space your text.

Paragraph Alignment & Indentation: Indent the first line of each paragraph by 0.5 inch. Align your paragraphs to the left margin.

Recommended Fonts

  • 11-point Calibri
  • 11-point Arial
  • 10-point Lucida Sans Unicode
  • 12-point Times New Roman
  • 11-point Georgia
  • 10-point Computer Modern

APA Citations for AI

In April 2023, APA provided guidance for citing responses from ChatGPT or output from another generative AI tool.

Include a description of the prompt when quoting output from a generative AI tool in your paper. Use the author of the AI algorithm - or the company who produced the tool - in both the in-text citation and full reference. It may be worthwhile to include the chat's transcript as an appendix to your project.

Format:

Author. (Date). Name of tool (Version of tool) [Large language model]. URL

Example:

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

In-Text Citation Example:

(OpenAI, 2023)

Attribution note

The STLCC Writing Center is your first source for citation help. This guide has been adapted by St. Louis Community College Libraries with the with the permission of Seneca College Libraries to provide further examples and resources. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For information on the original guide please contact lcc@senecacollege.ca. When copying this guide, please retain this box.

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