American Psychological Association (APA) style was developed to give a standard to academic writing.  Research that reports in APA style includes a title page, an abstract, an introduction, methods, results, discussions, references, and appendices.  The style format is concerned about typeface, line spacing, margins, and page headers.  Five levels of headings frame the details of an APA paper.

Language bias is to be avoided.  Plagiarism is avoided by citing sources within the text.  For example, if this sentence was taken from an article Smith published in 2003, the end of the sentence would end (Smith, 2003).  If Smith was quoted there it would end (Smith, 2003, p. 3), placing Smith’s exact words in quotation marks.  If the Smith quotation was longer than 40 words, the entire quotation, without quotation marks, would be indented.  Numbers less than 10 are written out, for example, two, three, or nine.

Reference lists, placed at the end of the paper, need to be as comprehensive as possible, listing information about the author, year of publication, title of work, publisher of work, and page numbers, in that order.  References use hanging indentations, meaning, the first line is flush left while subsequent lines are indented. Running heads are formatted to show at the top of each page.  Abstracts are not indented and usually are not more than 120 words. APA papers are double spaced.

APA is now in its 6^th Edition.  The newest changes reflect changes that technological searches bring to academic reporting.  Now, two spaces after a period, rather than one, are recommended for ease of reading.  Numbers representing lengths of time are now to be written out.