Penn Libraries Subscribes to the APA Style Manual Online

For the first time since its release in October 2019, the APA Style Manual, 7th edition, is now available online. The Penn Libraries’ subscription provides access to current Penn students, faculty, and staff.  

Style guides provide consistent standards for page formatting, section organization, tables and figures, and, most famously, for formatting citations. Scholars use citations to show other works which have influenced their thinking. Different fields have different formatting conventions to make tracking down citations, either manually or using automated methods, easier and more consistent. 

Organized by the American Psychological Association, APA style is the one of the most common citation and formatting styles used in academic scholarship. It is used most frequently in social sciences disciplines including anthropology, business, education, psychology, and social work. With the release of the APA Style Manual online, students and researchers in these disciplines no longer have to find a print manual or rely on third-party sources to make sure their citations are formatted correctly. In releasing an online counterpart, APA joins other online style guides like the Chicago Manual of Style Online and the MLA Handbook Online.  

Core Features 

The APA Style Manual online includes the entire manual, navigable with a hyperlinked table of contents and the ability to search through all text. Users can change the display to fit their own web navigation comfort by adjusting text font, size, and spacing, margin size, and background contrast. 

In addition to the manual itself, the subscription includes short lessons with examples. Faculty members requiring APA style in their courses could include a Canvas link to the lesson on how to cite references in text, or even a link directly to the relevant section on in-text citations in the manual.