How to Write a Research Paper in APA Format?

The APA (American Psychological Association) format is widely used in most colleges and high schools as the most popular for writing research papers. It is quite difficult to organize a research paper in the APA format yourself but it is possible if you follow our professional APA format writing tips.

APA Format Research Paper Writing Guidelines:

1. At first you must think over the organization of your research paper. Create an outline and remember that research papers should contain title, abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, references, appendices. Now, it is time to begin writing your research paper in the APA format. To begin with, set the left margin of your paper to 1 inch with left side justification and ragged right margins. Set the indent at 1\2 inch, the line spacing to double spaced. The paper must be written in Times New Roman.
2. Pages should be numbered in the top right corner. Every page should contain a short version of your title as the running header at the top left corner. Organize the title page of your research paper. Write the full title of your paper, than your name and institution.
3. Write the abstract to your paper. Remember about the organization of every page. After that write the introduction (on the new page). You do not have to write the header ‘Introduction’. After that write the sections: method, results and discussion. There is no need to separate them with new pages.
4. Begin to organize the references page. Be sure, you have written the works you used in the alphabetical order by the author’s last name. Now you must explain the citations, which is typical for the APA format of writing. When you borrow, paraphrase or quote the ideas of other sources, you must cite them in such a way: the author and the year of the reference.
5. Now, a few words about the headings. The main section headings should be centered and bold. The heading of the second level should be also bold but left justified. Every word in a title should be capitalized. The headings of the third level should be bold and left justified but the words are non-capitalized.
6. Using tables and diagrams, remember to place them on separate pages. All your figures, tables, statistics means should be placed after the references section.

As you see, writing a research paper in APA format is not so difficult as it seems to be. We hope our quality writing guidelines will help you prepare a successful research paper in APA format and improve your academic progress.