National American University Online Library: APA 7 Tips & Resources

• When you work on your college-level assignments, you will often read in the instructions that your paper or discussion posts must be “formatted in APA style” or that you need to “include APA style citations and references” for something you have written.
• “APA Style” refers to the style guide of the American Psychological Association. A style guide is a set of rules that writers and researchers follow to give their work a standardized format. The standard format helps them to understand where another researcher’s sources can be found and shows other researchers were to find the sources they have used.

• Citing: The process of acknowledging the sources of your information and ideas.
• D O I (doi): Some electronic content, such as online journal articles, is assigned a unique number called a Digital Object Identifier (D O I or doi). Items can be tracked down online using their doi.
• In-Text Citation: A brief note at the point where information is used from a source to indicate where the information came from. An in-text citation should always match more detailed information that is available in the Reference List.
• Paraphrasing: Taking information that you have read and putting it into your own words.
• Quoting: The copying of words of text originally published elsewhere. Direct quotations generally appear in quotation marks and end with a citation.
• Reference: Details about one cited source.
• Reference List: Contains details on ALL the sources cited in a text or essay, and supports your research and/or premise.
• Retrieval Date: Used for websites where content is likely to change over time (e.g. Wikis), the retrieval date refers to the date you last visited the website.
  
  (Source: Simmons University Library)

APA Style Regulates:

• Stylistics– to give the research paper a uniform look (cover page, page #s, double -paragraphs, etc.)

• In-text citations– to regulate how you use research to support your argument

• References– to allow other researchers to view the research that you cited in the body of your paper.