[zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources.
With Zotero you can:
Welcome to the APA section of the Toolkit. This section of the toolkit was created to help you with your APA questions. Please use the following tabs to navigate different sections of the toolkit.
Basic APA: This tab contains the basic information on setting up your paper. This includes general guidelines, using the right font style, size, spacing and your title page
Authors/Editors & Titles: This tab provides information on the rules of APA in regards to using author/editor names and titles.
Books: This tab will give you APA information on how to create citations for books that you have used.
Print Articles: This tab will provide APA information on how to write citations for print articles that you have used.
Electronic Articles: This tab will provide APA information on how to write citations for electronic articles that you have used.
In-Text Citations: This tab was developed to give you information on how to create proper APA in-text citations as well as provide some examples.
Reference List: This tab will provide you with information on how to properly create a reference citation list.
Setting up your paper
Fonts: APA prefers papers to be written in Times New Roman 12 pt.
Margins: Your margins should be set to 1 inch.
Page Numbers: Page numbers are required and should be place in the document header, right side.
Spacing: Your entire document should be double-spaced.
The Title Page
Title: Type your title in upper and lowercase letters centered in the upper half of the page. APA recommends that your title be no more than 12 words in length and that it should not contain abbreviations or words that serve no purpose. All text on your title page should be double-spaced.
Author's name: Beneath your title should be the author's name: first name, middle initial, and last name. Do not use titles (Dr.) or degrees (PhD).
Institutional Affiliation: Beneath the author's name, type the institutional affiliation.
Running head: A running head is a shortened version of the title and should be located in the document header, all in uppercase letters.
Page Numbers: Page numbers should be located in the document header, flush right. The title page is considered page 1.
Author & Editor Information
Tips
Titles
Tips:
Examples:
Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (book title, American Psychological Association is a proper noun so it is capitalized)
Individualized sleep promotion in acute care hospitals: Identifying factors that affect patient sleep (article title, Identifying is the first world of a sub-title so it is capitalized)
Applied Nursing Research (journal title)
Journal of Research in Nursing (journal title, notice the common word "of" and "in" are not capitalized)
Print Books
To write a citation for a book you need the following pieces of information:
Author's Last Name, First Initial. Second Initial if Given. (Year of Publication). Title of book: Subtitle if given
(edition of book if given and is not the first edition). Publication City, Province, State or Country: Publisher Name.
Book in Print with One Author:
Watson, J. (2012) Human caring science: A theory of nursing (2nd ed.). Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning
Book in Print with Two to Seven Authors:
Manzo, A. V., Manzo, U.C., & Thomas, M. M. (2005). Content area literacy (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.
eBooks
Author's Last Name, First Iniital. Second Initial if Given. (Year of Publication). Title of book: Subtitle if given (edition if given).
Retrieved from Database Name database.
eBook from a library database with One Author:
Waldau, P. (2010). Animal Rights: What everyone needs to know. Retrieved from eBook collection (EBSCOhost)database.
eBook from a library database with Two to Seven Authors
Simpson, M.T., Backman, K., & Corley, J.E. (2012). Hands-on ethical hacking and network defense. Retrieved from Safari Books Online database.
Print Journal Articles
To write a citation for a printed journal article you need the following information:
Author's Last Name, First Initial if Given. (Year of Publication). Title of article: Subtitle if Given. Name of Journal,
Volume Number(Issue Number), first page number-last page number.
Print Article with One Author:
Jungers, W.L. (2010) Biomechanics: Barefoot running strikes back. Nature(2), 433-435.
Print Article with Eight or More Authors:
Chan, S.S., Chan., W., Cheng, Y., Fung, O. M., Lai, T.H., Leung, A. K., & ... Pang, S. C. (2010). Development and escalation of an undergraduate
training course for developing international council of nurses disaster nursing competencies in China. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 42(4),
405-413.
Electronic Journals
Electronic articles are articles that you find the full-text online via our library databases or through other sources like GoogleScholar. The citations to electronic articles are similar to print article, however you will need additional information in your citation. This includes adding a url to the end of your citation that is NOT hyperlinked. You will also NOT add a period at the end of your citation with a DOI.
To write a citation for an electronic journal article you need the following information:
Journal Article From Library Database with DOI - One Author
Author's Last Name, First Initial. Second Initial if Given. (Year of Publication). Title of article: Subtitle if Given. Name of Journal, Volume Number
(Issue Number), first page number-last page number. doi: doi number
Bailey, N.W. (2012). Evolutionary models of extended phenotypes. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 27(3),
561-569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2012.05.011
Journal Article From Library Database with No DOI - One Author
Author's Last Name, First Initial. Second Initial if Given. (Year of Publication). Title of article: Subtitle if Given. Name of Journal, Volume Number
(Issue Number), first page number-last page number. Retrieved from Name of Database.
Carlisle, D. (2012). In the line of fire. Nursing Standard, 26(39), 18-19. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete.
Writing in-text citations
In-text citations are citations that you include within the body of the paper you are writing. APA states that the proper way to do an in-text citation is to use the author-date method. Your in-text citations must reflect you reference list. This page of the toolkit was created to cover the very basics of an APA in-text citation. For more examples and elaborate instructions please refer to chapter 6 of the APA Manual.
There are two main ways of which you can write an in-text citation:
Author's name as part of the sentence followed by the year in parentheses.
According to Neville (2017) medical residents...
Place both the author's information and the publication year in parentheses.
Empowering girls through education can be effective in preventing child marriage and can foster change relatively quickly (Lee-Rife, Malhotra, Warner, & Glinski, 2012).
Paraphrased with One or Multiple Authors
When you paraphrase ideas from another author's text you still need to cite it properly. What is required of you is to cite the author and year of publication. Your instructor may also require you to list the page number of where the idea originated.
One Author Example:
An increase in intensity and duration with good glycemic control does play a vital role in regulating glucose and doing so decreases the risk for exercise-induced hypoglycemia (Aljawarneh, 2019).
Two author example:
An increase in intensity and duration with good glycemic control does play a vital role in regulating glucose and doing so decreases the risk for exercise-induced hypoglycemia (Aljawarneh & Wardell, 2019).
Three or more authors example:
An increase in intensity and duration with good glycemic control does play a vital role in regulating glucose and doing so decreases the risk for exercise-induced hypoglycemia (Aljawarneh et al., 2019).
Creating a Reference List
It is required to follow the following instructions in order to make a proper APA reference list:
Below is a PDF of an example of an APA reference page