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What APA Style Editing Actually Covers

APA Style Editing aligns a manuscript with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition, released in 2019. This standard governs psychology, education, social sciences, nursing, and a growing share of business and communications work. Beyond surface formatting, APA imposes rules on citations, references, table and figure presentation, heading hierarchy, and bias-free language. An editor reconciles every in-text citation with the reference list, verifies DOIs, normalises capitalisation, and rebuilds tables and figures.

APA 7 introduced meaningful changes from APA 6: the running head is no longer required for student papers, “they” is accepted as a singular pronoun, up to 20 author names appear in a reference entry before an ellipsis, and DOIs are presented as functional URLs (https://doi.org/…) without the “doi:” prefix. APA editing means actively converting older-edition habits into APA 7 conventions.

APA 7 Citation Format

In-text citations follow the author–date pattern: (Author, Year) for paraphrase, and (Author, Year, p. XX) for direct quotation. Two authors are joined by an ampersand in parentheses (Smith & Jones, 2021) and by “and” in narrative use. For three or more authors, APA 7 uses “et al.” from the first citation onward — a frequent error is reverting to the APA 6 rule of listing all authors on first mention. An editor checks every citation for ampersand use, “et al.” placement, page numbers on direct quotes, and suffixes (2021a, 2021b) for multiple works in the same year.

Reference List, Tables, and Figures

The reference list is alphabetised by first author surname, set with a hanging indent, and double-spaced. Book and journal titles are italicised; article titles are not. Articles published from 2007 onward must include a DOI as a clickable https://doi.org/ link. Tables are numbered consecutively (Table 1, Table 2…) with the title in italics beneath the number, both flush left, and any source or general note placed below the table body. Figures follow the same pattern but with the caption beneath the image. Headings use five levels: levels 1–3 are bold and levels 4–5 are italic.

Why Authors Choose APA Style Editing

• Dissertation and thesis committees in psychology, education, nursing, and social work require strict APA 7 compliance before defence.
• Peer-reviewed journals in the social sciences reject submissions that mix APA 6 and APA 7 conventions or ship broken DOI links.
• Self-published academic books and practitioner guides need APA-conformant references to be taken seriously.
• Co-authored manuscripts often arrive with inconsistent “et al.” usage, mixed retrieval-date conventions, and uneven italics.
• Tables and figures from Word, Excel, or statistical software rarely conform to APA numbering and caption rules without manual rebuilding.

FAQ

Does APA 7 still require a running head on every page?
Only professional papers require a running head; student papers do not. The page number alone appears in the header on student work.

How are three or more authors cited in-text under APA 7?
Use the first author followed by “et al.” from the first citation onward, e.g., (García et al., 2022). The APA 6 first-mention-lists-all rule no longer applies.

Are DOIs mandatory in the reference list?
For journal articles published in 2007 or later, yes. They are formatted as functional URLs — https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx — with no “doi:” prefix.

Where do table and figure captions go?
Table titles sit above the table body in italics on the line below the table number. Figure captions sit below the figure. Both are numbered consecutively in the order they are referenced.

How many heading levels does APA 7 define?
Five. Levels 1, 2, and 3 are bold; levels 4 and 5 are bold italic and italic respectively.