APA 7 checklist before you submit

Ten checks worth doing before handing in a seminar paper or thesis: in-text citations, the reference list, tables and formatting.

APA mistakes are among the easiest ways to lose points, and the easiest to fix. Go through this list before you submit. And if your department has published its own guidelines, especially for Hebrew sources, those take precedence.

In-text citations

1. Every citation appears in the reference list, and every source in the list is cited in the text. This is the most important check.
2. Two authors: with & in parentheses, as in (Cohen & Levi, 2020); with "and" in the running text: Cohen and Levi (2020).
3. Three or more authors: write et al. from the very first citation, as in (Cohen et al., 2021). This is one of the most noticeable changes in APA 7.
4. Direct quotes: in quotation marks and with a page number, as in (Cohen, 2020, p. 14).

The reference list

5. Alphabetical order by the first author's surname, double-spaced, with a hanging indent (the second line of each entry indented).
6. A journal article looks like this (journal name and volume in italics, issue number in parentheses and not italicized):

Author, A. A., & Author, B. B. (2020). Title of the article in sentence case. Journal Name in Title Case, 12(3), 45–67. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx

7. DOI appears as a full link (https://doi.org/...), without "Retrieved from" and without a full stop at the end.
8. Article title capitalizes only the first word and proper nouns. The journal name capitalizes every major word.

Tables and figures

9. Table number in bold on one line, title in italics on the next line, no vertical lines, and every table referred to in the text ("see Table 2").

General formatting

10. Heading levels: level 1 bold and centered, level 2 bold and flush left, and so on. Page numbers on every page, and a title page as your institution requires.

Mistakes that come up again and again

• A different year in the text and in the list for the same source.
• "et al." in the reference list. In the list you write all the authors, up to 20.
• Mixed styles: some sources in APA 6 and some in APA 7.
• Websites without a publication date. When there's no date, write (n.d.).

Going deeper

The full rules, with examples: APA 7 in-text citations, APA 7 reference list, APA 7 tables and figures, and how to cite ChatGPT and declare AI use.

Last updated: 2026-09-27