A Tutorial on the Scientific Research Paper APA Format
The American Psychological Association (APA) writing format is a common in academic writing. Identifying some of the important concepts is, therefore, important. Here is a tutorial on a scientific research paper APA formatting:
- The margins
- Font size
- Spacing
- Alignment
- Pagination
- Running head
- Short title
- Text citation
The margins on the top, bottom, right and left of your paper should measure one inch. Your tutors may however request that you utilize the traditional one and a half margins.
The general font side for an APA should be 12 points, Times New Roman. To ensure that the whole paper has such a font size, highlight the paper and click on the recommended font size. This is particularly important after including images or an automatic table of contents since they may be written in different font sizes.
The whole document should be double spaced. You should also space once after every word and punctuation.
You should flush left your alignment
The pages should have the order of title page, abstract, introduction, body, conclusion, references, appendices, tables and figures. The title page should be page 1 of the paper.
Note that an APA paper’s title page has three major components namely the title of the paper, student’s name and the school affiliation. These components should be placed at the center of the paper.
Running heads should be flush left at the top of the paper and should be capitalized. They should not be lengthy and therefore, it is important to edit the title of the paper so that the running heads do not exceed 50 characters.
The title of your research should be short and written on the title page and on the second page of your paper.
To avoid issues of plagiarism, it is critical to provide in-text citation. The author’s surname and the date of publication should be provided within the body. At the reference section, you should provide all the sources used in the paper. The order for this is- the author, year of publication, title of the source, and retrieval information if websites have been used.
The city and the publisher’s name are important to include at the end of the citation in case a researcher has used books. Further, journal articles necessitate that the volume, the issue number and the number pages are included after writing the title of the source and the journal’s name.
With the discussed elements in place, you will submit an outstanding scientific research paper. You should however read the instructions carefully to find out whether your tutor has other special requirements.