Nursing

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

• You should include all authors up to 7 according to APA standards.
• If there are more than 8 authors you list the first 6, then put three ellipses and then add the last author
• Use initials for the first and middle names of authors.
• All named are to be inverted (last name, first initial).
• Separate the authors' names using a comma and use the & symbol before the last author is listed.
• If there is no author listed, the item title moves in front of the publication date and is used.

Titles

Tips:

• Book and journal titles are italicized.
• Book chapter titles and article titles are plainly written.  They are NOT italicized, underlined or place in quotation marks.
• For journal titles, the entire title (except for a, an, and, etc.) are capitalized. 
• For both book titles, book chapter titles, and article titles only the first word of the title, a sub-title or a proper nounr is to capitalized.

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 or editors
• Year of publication
• Book title, including edition information
• Publication information (city, state and publishing company)

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)
• Year
• Article title
• Journal title
• Volume number
• Issue Number
• Page numbers

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:

• Author(s)
• Year
• Article title
• Journal title
• Volume number
• Issue Number
• Page numbers
• DOI number or URL of the journal 

​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.

Webpage on a website with a group author examples from APA 7th edition

When the author and site name are the same, omit the site name for the source element.

Examples:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018, January 23). People at high risk of

     developing flu-related complications. https://cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/high_

      risk.htm

Parenthetical citations:

(Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, 2018) 

World Health Organization. (2018, March) Questions and answers on immunization

      and vaccine safety. https://www.who.int/features/qa/84/en/

Parenthetical citations:

(World Health Organization, 2018) 

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).​

Other in-text citation styles

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:

• Reference list should be double spaced
• Indent the second and subsequent lines of citation
• Arrange the reference list alphabetically by author's last name
• Make sure to list all the authors on a particular citation (do not use et al. on a reference list)
• The & symbol should be used before listing the last author
• Italicize journal, magazine, book titles and the volume number
• Only capitalize the first word of a title, subtitle, or proper noun in book, book chapter, or article titles
• Make sure to properly format the citation if its a print or electronic journal 
• Up to 20 authors can now be included in a reference list entry before needing to omit others with an ellpsis.

Below is a PDF of an example of an APA reference page