Five APA 7 Mistakes I See Constantly

By Kayla · KG Editing

After editing hundreds of academic manuscripts, I've noticed that the same handful of APA 7th edition mistakes appear again and again. The good news is that once you know what to look for, they're quick to fix. Here are the five I catch most often.

1. Missing or inconsistent DOIs

In APA 7, a DOI should be formatted as a full working link, like https://doi.org/xxxxx, with no label such as "doi:" in front of it. Many writers mix formats throughout their reference list. Pick the URL format and apply it to every entry that has a DOI.

2. Including publisher locations

APA 6 asked for the city and state of the publisher. APA 7 dropped that entirely. If your book references still read "New York, NY: Penguin," you're using the old style. Simply list the publisher name on its own.

3. Getting the ampersand wrong

Inside parenthetical citations, use an ampersand: (Smith & Jones, 2021). In the narrative running text, spell out "and": "Smith and Jones argued..." The same rule applies in your reference list, where the ampersand appears before the final author.

4. Title case versus sentence case

This one trips up almost everyone. In the reference list, article and book titles use sentence case, meaning you capitalize only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. Journal names, however, use title case. Mixing these up is the single most common error I fix.

5. Alphabetical order and hanging indents

Your reference list must be alphabetical by the first author's surname, with a hanging indent on every entry. Word can apply hanging indents automatically, but writers often add them manually with tabs, which breaks as soon as the text reflows.

If your reference list is giving you a headache, this is exactly the kind of detailed, entry-by-entry work I do. I can bring your whole document into line with APA 7 so you can focus on your ideas instead of your commas.