APA Research Paper Example: APA 7 Formatting Guide

Most APA guides tell you the rules, which is rarely the problem. You already know the paper should be double spaced. What you want is to see what a finished one looks like, so you can hold your draft against it and spot what is wrong.

So that is what this is: a paper formatted in APA 7, section by section, with the rule explained beside each part.

One thing to settle first, because it changes your title page before you write a word.

Are you writing a student paper or a professional paper?

APA 7 formats the two differently, and mixing them up is the most common reason a well written paper comes back marked down on formatting.

A student paper is anything submitted for a course. The title page carries the paper title, your name, your university, the course number and name, your instructor, and the due date. There is no running head. An abstract is not required unless your instructor asks for one.

A professional paper is written for publication. It needs a running head, which is a shortened title in capital letters, flush left in the header. It needs an abstract, and usually an author note on the title page.

If you are a student and you have added a running head, remove it. If you have written an abstract nobody asked for, check the assignment brief first.

Page setup

These apply to every page of both paper types:

One inch margins on all four sides.
Double spacing throughout, including the reference list. No extra space between paragraphs.
Page number in the top right of every page, starting with the title page.
First line of each paragraph indented half an inch.
An accessible font used consistently. APA accepts 12 point Times New Roman, 11 point Calibri, 11 point Arial, 11 point Georgia, 10 point Lucida Sans Unicode and 10 point Computer Modern.

There is no single required font. Pick one and do not switch halfway through.

The title page

For a student paper, the title sits three or four lines down from the top, centred and bold, in the title case. Leave one blank double spaced line, then add each of these on its own line, centred and not bold: your name, your institution, the course number and name, your instructor's name, and the due date written out in full.

That is the whole page.

The abstract

If your paper needs one, it goes on its own page after the title page. The word Abstract goes at the top, centred and bold. The paragraph beneath it is not indented, which is the one place in the paper where that rule flips.

Aim for 150 to 250 words covering the problem, the method, the main result and what it means.

Below it, indent one line and write Keywords in italics, followed by a colon and three to five terms in lower case.

The five heading levels

This is where most drafts fall apart, because writers invent their own hierarchy. APA gives you five fixed levels:

Level 1: centred, bold, title case. Your main sections.
Level 2: flush left, bold, title case.
Level 3: flush left, bold italic, title case.
Level 4: indented, bold, title case, ending with a full stop, with your text starting on the same line.
Level 5: indented, bold italic, title case, ending with a full stop, text on the same line.

Use them in order and do not skip. If your paper has two levels of structure, you use Level 1 and Level 2 only.

One catch: the paper's own title, repeated in bold where the introduction begins, is not a heading. Do not label that section Introduction.

In text citations

Every claim taken from somewhere else needs an author and a year, either in brackets or worked into the sentence.

One author: (Nguyen, 2021), or Nguyen (2021) found that.
Two authors: (Nguyen & Park, 2021) inside brackets. Use the word and, not an ampersand, when the names appear in your sentence.
Three or more authors: (Nguyen et al., 2021), from the very first citation. APA 7 dropped the old rule about listing everyone the first time.
Direct quotation: add the page, as in (Nguyen, 2021, p. 47).

The reference list

New page. The word References at the top, centred and bold. Every entry is double spaced with a hanging indent, so the first line sits at the margin and the rest is indented half an inch. Order alphabetically by first author's surname.

A journal article runs: authors, year in brackets, article title in sentence case, journal name in italics, volume in italics, issue in brackets, page range, then the DOI as a full doi.org address with no full stop after it.

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (2021). Title of the article in sentence case. Journal Name, 12(3), 45-67.

Some entries trip people up more than others:

A preprint takes the repository name in place of the journal, with the preprint's own identifier. If it has since been published, cite the published version.
A book chapter needs the chapter authors, chapter title, editors, book title in italics, page range and publisher.
A dataset is cited as a source in its own right, with a bracketed descriptor after the title marking it as data.
Generative AI output is cited as software: the company as author, the version year, the model name, and a bracketed descriptor.

If an entry has no DOI, our guide on how to find the DOI of a paper covers where to look before you give up on it.

The errors that cost marks most often

A running head on a student paper.
Single spacing in the reference list, or extra blank lines between entries.
Title case in article titles. APA wants sentence case for the article, title case for the journal.
A reference list that does not match the in text citations. Every source cited must appear, and nothing uncited should.
Manual indents made with the space bar instead of a real hanging indent, which collapse the moment the document is reformatted.

FAQ

Is APA 7 still the current edition? Yes. The seventh edition was published in October 2019 and remains current in 2026. There is no eighth edition.

Do student papers need an abstract? Usually not, unless the assignment asks for one. Check the brief.

Is a running head required? Only for professional papers intended for publication.

How many references should a paper have? There is no set number. Enough to support your argument, and every one of them actually cited in the text.

Before you submit

Read it once looking only at formatting, ignoring the argument. Check the title page against the student or professional list, check the headings run in order, and check every reference against every citation.

Formatting is the easiest part of a paper to get right and the easiest to lose marks on. Search 65M+ papers on Canyam to pull accurate metadata for anything in your reference list before you hand it in.