How to Reference APA 7: UK Guide

APA 7 referencing is widely required in UK psychology, education and social-science courses, and the seventh edition made several changes worth knowing. APA 7th edition is increasingly used by UK psychology, education, and social science departments. This guide covers the key rules so you can format citations correctly. If APA formatting eats into your writing time, our dissertation writing services include full referencing support.

The Short Answer

APA 7 pairs an author–date in-text citation with a single alphabetical list headed References. The seventh edition made four changes that matter most in practice: et al. is used from the first citation for any work with three or more authors, up to twenty authors are listed in full in a reference entry, the place of publication is no longer given for books, and DOIs and web addresses are presented as plain links without the label doi. Student papers also use a simplified title page and normally need no running head.

APA 7 Referencing: In-Text Citations

Use author-date format such as (Smith, 2024), and include a page number for direct quotes, for example (Smith, 2024, p. 15). APA 7 uses author–date in-text citations, for example (Smith, 2024), with a page number for direct quotes. For works with three or more authors you now use the first author plus “et al.” from the very first citation — a key simplification from APA 6. Place citations precisely so every claim is traceable.

Formatting the Reference List

List sources alphabetically by author surname, using a hanging indent, with the reference list titled simply References on its own page. The reference list is alphabetical by surname, double-spaced, with a hanging indent. Each entry gives author, year, title, source and, where relevant, a DOI. APA 7 presents DOIs as full URLs and no longer requires “Retrieved from” before them, which streamlines online sources considerably.

What Changed From APA 6 to APA 7

APA 7 allows up to twenty authors to be listed before using et al., removes the requirement for publisher location, and no longer requires the label Retrieved from before URLs. Beyond the et al. rule, APA 7 allows up to 20 authors in a reference before truncating, drops the publisher location for books, and formalises singular “they.” Knowing these updates prevents you from applying outdated APA 6 habits that markers will spot instantly.

Common APA 7 Mistakes to Avoid

Watch out for inconsistent capitalisation in titles, missing DOIs for journal articles, and mixing APA with another referencing style within the same document. Frequent errors include mismatched in-text and reference entries, missing DOIs, inconsistent capitalisation in titles, and applying old APA 6 rules. Checking your work against your institution’s guidance — aligned with recognised standards from the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education — keeps your referencing clean.

APA 7 Quick Checklist

• Author–date citations, with “et al.” from the first citation for 3+ authors.
• Page numbers on all direct quotes.
• DOIs as URLs, without “Retrieved from”.
• Hanging indent and alphabetical reference list.
• No leftover APA 6 habits in your formatting.

APA 7 for the UK Disciplines That Use It Most

APA is the default style on most UK psychology programmes, and it is widespread in nursing, midwifery, allied health, education, social work, sports science and parts of business and management. Each brings its own emphasis, and knowing your discipline’s habits saves marks that the manual alone will not.

Psychology markers tend to be the strictest about the full reporting of statistics, the exact format of the reference list and the structure of an empirical report, since these mirror journal requirements and are explicitly taught. Nursing and health programmes care most about currency and hierarchy of evidence: recent peer-reviewed research, systematic reviews and national clinical guidance rather than textbooks, and they expect clinical guidance to be referenced by issuing body rather than by an individual. Education and social work often combine APA with policy documents and legislation, which the manual covers only lightly.

The practical implication is to check whether your school publishes its own APA guide, because many do, and a departmental guide overrides the general manual where the two differ. Where your discipline routinely cites material the manual barely addresses — clinical guidelines, inspection reports, curriculum documents, professional standards — follow your department’s examples and be consistent. Our companion APA referencing guide covers the general mechanics in more depth.

Reporting Numbers and Statistics in APA 7

APA has detailed rules for numbers, and they are among the easiest marks to collect because they are purely mechanical. Use numerals for ten and above and for all numbers that represent statistics, percentages, ages, sample sizes, scores and points on a scale; spell out numbers below ten in ordinary prose and any number that opens a sentence. Use a leading zero before a decimal for quantities that can exceed one, and omit it for those that cannot, such as probability values and correlation coefficients.

Statistical symbols are italicised when they represent variables or statistics — the symbols for mean, standard deviation, the t statistic, the F ratio, the probability value, the correlation coefficient and sample size all take italics, while Greek letters do not. Report two decimal places for most statistics and three for probability values, giving exact values rather than only whether they fell above or below a threshold. Where a value is extremely small, report it as less than the smallest value your software displays.

Full reporting means giving the test statistic with its degrees of freedom, the exact probability, and an effect size with a confidence interval. That last element is expected in APA 7 and is the part students most often omit, yet it answers the question that matters: how large the difference or relationship actually is. Present descriptive statistics for every group you compare, and put the detailed output in an appendix rather than the body of the report.

The APA 7 Abstract, Keywords and Author Note

An APA abstract is a single unindented paragraph, usually between 150 and 250 words, that states the problem, the participants and method, the main results with the key statistics, and the conclusion or implication. It contains no citations, no abbreviations that are not defined, and no promises about what the paper will explore. Write it last, from the finished paper, and check that every claim in it appears in the body.

Keywords follow on the next line, indented, introduced by the italicised word Keywords followed by a colon, then three to five terms in lower case separated by commas. Choose terms a reader would actually search for, including the population, the method and the central construct, and avoid repeating words already in your title since those are indexed anyway.

An author note appears on the title page of professional papers, giving affiliations, funding, conflicts of interest, data availability and correspondence details. Student papers normally omit it, but check your brief, because some UK dissertation templates require a declaration, a word count or an ethics approval reference in that position. Our guide to writing an abstract covers the content decisions in more detail.

Referencing UK Legislation, Government and Grey Literature in APA

The manual is written from a United States perspective, so UK legal and official material needs adaptation and this is where most students improvise badly. The workable approach, and the one most UK departments publish, is to treat these sources as reports with a corporate author. An Act of Parliament is cited by its short title and year, which is how lawyers and readers recognise it, with the reference entry giving the title, year and the official source where you consulted it.

Government publications take the issuing department as author, then the year, the title in italics, and the source. Where the publisher and the author are the same body, do not repeat the name. Statistical releases from national statistics bodies follow the same pattern with the dataset or release title, the reference period, and the address. Clinical guidance is referenced by the issuing organisation with the guideline number included in the title, because practitioners cite by number and your reader will look for it.

Grey literature — charity reports, think tank papers, inspection reports, professional standards, conference posters, unpublished theses — is legitimate evidence in many disciplines provided you evaluate its provenance rather than treating it as equivalent to peer-reviewed work. Record the author organisation, the year, the exact title, any report or series number, and a stable address, and say in your text what kind of source it is so a reader can weigh it appropriately. If your discipline requires a legal style instead, note that UK law schools use OSCOLA rather than APA.

Get Expert Help With APA 7 Referencing

Clean APA 7 referencing protects easy marks and shows attention to detail. Projectsdeal has supported UK students since 2001. Explore our dissertation writing services or read genuine Projectsdeal reviews to see how we help students reference accurately.

APA 7 Reference Examples for Common Source Types

Seeing the exact structure for each source type is the fastest way to get APA 7 right. Use these templates and swap in your own details.

• Book: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book (Edition). Publisher.
• Journal article: Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (Year). Title of the article. Journal Name, Volume(Issue), pages.
• Chapter in an edited book: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the chapter. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of the book (pp. xx–xx). Publisher.
• Website: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the page. Site Name.
• Organisation report: Organisation Name. (Year). Title of the report (Report No. xxx). Publisher.

Remember that APA 7 no longer requires the publisher location, and for online journal articles the DOI is shown as a full https link rather than the older “doi:” prefix.

Handling Multiple Authors and Tricky Citations

APA 7 changed how you cite works with many authors, so this is where students most often slip up. For a work with three or more authors, use the first author’s surname followed by “et al.” from the very first citation — for example, (Jones et al., 2023). In the reference list you may name up to 20 authors before using an ellipsis. When a source has no named author, move the title into the author position; when it has no date, use (n.d.). If you found a source quoted in another work, name the original and add “as cited in” before the source you actually read.

APA 7 Paper Formatting: Title Page, Headings and Font

APA 7 is not only about citations — markers also expect the document itself to follow the style. Use a title page with the paper title, your name and institution; double-space the whole document in a legible font such as 12-point Times New Roman or 11-point Calibri; and apply APA’s five heading levels consistently. The student version of APA 7 no longer needs a running head on every page, a common point of confusion for UK students working from older templates. If your department has its own house style, follow that first and apply APA 7 for anything it does not specify. For a fully formatted, correctly referenced model to work from, ProjectsDeal’s referencing specialists can help.

Citing Datasets, Software, Tests and Measures

Empirical work increasingly depends on sources that are not documents, and APA 7 handles them with a bracketed descriptor after the title. A dataset entry gives the creator, the year, the italicised title, a descriptor identifying it as a data set, the version if there is one, the repository as publisher, and a DOI. Version numbers are not optional here: results that cannot be traced to a specific version cannot be reproduced.

Software follows the same shape with a descriptor identifying it as computer software, and APA does not require you to reference standard software used only as a tool — you name your word processor or your statistics package in the method rather than in the reference list, giving the version. You do reference specialised software, packages and libraries that shaped your analysis, and if you wrote your own code you should say where it can be inspected.

Tests, scales and inventories deserve particular care because two different things can be referenced: the instrument itself and the article that validated it. Cite the validation article when you are justifying your choice of measure and reporting its reliability, and cite the instrument when you are describing exactly what participants completed. Include the number of items, the response format, the scoring direction and a reported reliability coefficient from your own sample as well as from the literature. Many instruments are also copyrighted, so check whether permission is needed before reproducing one in an appendix.

Setting APA 7 Up Properly in Your Word Processor

A great deal of APA formatting pain comes from fighting the software rather than configuring it. Set your heading styles once so that the five APA levels are defined in the style pane, then apply styles rather than formatting text by hand. This gives you an automatic contents list, reliable navigation in a long document, and consistency that survives editing.

Create the hanging indent in your reference list through paragraph settings applied to the whole list, never with tabs or manual line breaks, which collapse the moment a name changes length. Set double spacing and paragraph indentation at the style level rather than the selection level. Insert page numbers through the header field so they renumber themselves. If your reference list needs to be alphabetised, sort it with the software rather than by eye, then check the result, since sorting treats corporate authors and initial articles unpredictably.

Reference managers such as Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote will generate APA 7 output and are worth using for anything dissertation-sized, but treat their output as a draft. Automatically captured metadata is frequently wrong — titles in the wrong case, chapters recorded as books, organisations recorded as people, missing issue numbers, dates taken from a page footer. Check every entry against the source itself, because the marker will assume that anything in your list is something you read.

Student Papers Versus Professional Papers

APA 7 formally distinguishes the two, and knowing which you are writing removes a lot of uncertainty. A student paper has a title page carrying the bold title, your name, your department and institution, the module, the tutor and the due date, all centred in the upper half of the page. It needs a page number in the top right but no running head, and it does not require an author note, an abstract or keywords unless the brief asks for them.

A professional paper adds a running head in capitals, an author note, an abstract with keywords, and the affiliation formatting used by journals. Where a UK dissertation sits between the two is a decision for your department, and the answer is normally in the submission template. Use the template if one exists, even where it departs from the manual.

The other student-paper simplification worth knowing is that APA 7 no longer expects you to follow journal conventions you cannot control, such as specifying a single mandated font. Any legible font used consistently is acceptable, with several named as suitable. What has not relaxed is consistency: one font, one spacing, one heading system, one reference format throughout. Mixed formatting is the fault markers notice fastest because it is visible before a word is read.

The APA 7 Errors Markers Report Most Often

The recurring list is short and entirely fixable. Listing all authors on first citation for a work with three or more, which is a sixth-edition habit. Using an ampersand in running text or the word and inside brackets, when the rule is the reverse. Including the place of publication for books, which APA 7 dropped. Writing the label doi before a digital object identifier instead of presenting it as a plain link. Putting titles in title case when APA uses sentence case for article and book titles.

Then the structural ones. A reference list that is not alphabetised, or that is alphabetised but lacks hanging indents. Entries present in the list but never cited, or cited but missing from the list. Years that differ between the text and the list. Direct quotations without page numbers. Secondary citations used where the original was freely available. Web addresses that resolve only through an institutional proxy.

Finally, the ones that cost most. Statistics reported without effect sizes or confidence intervals. Probability values given only as above or below a threshold. Tables and figures without numbers, captions or notes, or reproduced from another source with no copyright attribution. Fabricated or unverifiable references, which are treated far more seriously than formatting slips. Working through this list takes under an hour on a finished draft and reliably recovers marks. For the broader principles behind citation practice, see our guide to citing sources.

Frequently Asked Questions