Let’s set the scene.
It is the first week of my doctoral program. I am enrolled in a new online course, which means my entire orientation to this new academic world arrives through a syllabus I am reading on my laptop. I am scrolling through the course requirements, assignment weights, discussion board expectations, and then I hit it. One line. Sitting there like it is not about to rearrange my entire academic personality.
All written work must follow APA 7th edition formatting.
I stared at it. I read it again. Then I closed my laptop, walked away to get a fresh Coke, and had a brief internal conversation with myself about whether this was really happening. Was that a bit dramatic? Sure. But I have reasons.
Here is the thing. I had just finished a master’s degree in theological studies. A degree where I had spent 3 years learning to footnote with the precision of someone defusing a very literary bomb. A degree where Turabian format should have been considered another spiritual discipline. And now, on the first page of my first doctoral syllabus, I was being informed that all of that was, professionally speaking, beside the point. I failed to realize that even though my PhD would be Psychology: Theology, the Psychology overruled the Theology when it pertains to citing my work.
So. Welcome to the blog where I tell you everything about citations that I had to learn the hard way, so maybe you do not have to.
Buy the Books. Tab the Books. Love the Books.
Before we go any further, I want to give you the most practical advice I can offer, and it is this: buy the physical manuals. If you need both like I did, then buy both of them. Regardless, you want to make sure you have a physical copy on hand. It makes life so much easier when you need to flip back and forth.
For theology, humanities, and history work, you want Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (currently in its 9th edition). For psychology, social sciences, and most doctoral work in professional programs, you want the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition). These are not the kind of books you skim once and leave on a shelf. They will become your friend and writing companion. They are reference books, which means they are most useful when you can get to the right page fast, not spending half of your day searching for what you need.
So please go ahead and follow this next tip: purchase some tabs. The sticky flag kind. They have tabs available that correspond with the book pages. You will thank yourself at 11pm when you are finishing a discussion post and you cannot remember whether the journal title or the article title gets italicized (more on that in a minute).
I know we live in a world where you can Google most things. And yes, Purdue OWL exists, and it is helpful. But the manual itself is the authoritative source, and when your professor questions your formatting, “I found it on a website” is a much weaker defense than “per the 7th edition manual, page 316.” I have also found that using online search for proper formatting can give you an array of answers, that could possibly be referencing previous editions.
Turabian vs. APA
This might not be an enjoyable blog read for most, but for those of us still writing, I want to be sure to explain the differences in the two styles. If this is not your sort of thing, check out some of my other blog posts. I write on a little bit of everything.
Turabian is the citation style of the humanities. I want to make mention that I. Love. Turabian. It took me a while to learn but I grew to love it along the way.
The humanities include theology, history, philosophy, literary studies. Turabian format comes from the Chicago Manual of Style, adapted by Kate Turabian specifically for students writing research papers. The signature move of Turabian is the footnote. You place a small superscript number in your text, and then at the bottom of the page, you explain yourself. I love a good footnote. It feels dignified. It feels like scholarship. It is also, if you are not careful, a trap with about fourteen different settings. Did I mention that you can’t just put what you want in a footnote?
APA is the citation style of the social sciences. Psychology, education, counseling, sociology. The American Psychological Association publishes it, updates it periodically (7th edition is current as of 2020), and expects you to use it with a level of precision. Instead of footnotes, APA uses parenthetical in-text citations paired with a reference list at the end of the paper. Every source you cite in the text must appear in the reference list. Every entry in the reference list must have a corresponding in-text citation. No exceptions, no extras.
Both systems serve the same fundamental purpose: crediting sources and making your work traceable. But they approach that goal differently. They are the difference between a correctly formatted paper and one that comes back with comments and a grade that is a far cry from the one you were hoping for.
The Turabian Traps
Turabian has a charm to it. I like being able to slap a footnote on something when I am writing. The footnotes feel like little conversations you get to have with your reader at the bottom of the page. The bibliography at the end is what you would expect for a references page.
The footnote and the bibliography are formatted differently, and that is intentional.
This is the one that catches people first, and it catches them because it is counterintuitive. You would think the citation for the same source would look the same everywhere it appears. In Turabian, it does not.
Your footnote looks like this:
Tyler J. Coen, Learning to Cite Things Without Crying (Nashville: Academic Press, 2024), 47.
Your bibliography entry for the same source looks like this:
Coen, Tyler D. Learning to Cite Things Without Crying. Nashville: Academic Press, 2024.
Notice what changed. The author name flipped from first-last to last-first. The punctuation shifted from commas to periods. The page number disappeared entirely. Turabian wants two different performances from the same source depending on where it appears, and it will not remind you which performance goes where.
Subsequent footnotes are shorter, and ibid. is largely retired.
The first time you cite a source in Turabian, you write the full footnote. Every time after that, you use a shortened version: Last name, Short Title, page number. That is it. You do not rewrite the full citation every time.
What you also do not do, if you are following the 9th edition, is pepper your footnotes with ibid. Turabian retired most uses of ibid. in the 9th edition, but the message apparently did not reach everyone, because it still shows up in student papers with some regularity. When in doubt, use the shortened form. Another tricky part to this is that the professor may require you to do it one way versus another. That’s always my favorite! I love a good 9.5th edition.
Titles in italics versus titles in quotation marks.
This stuff may seem like it doesn’t matter but it really does in good academic writing. Full published works get italics: books, journals, albums, websites. Shorter works get quotation marks: articles, chapters, essays, podcast episodes. This rule exists in most citation styles in some form, but people mix it up constantly, usually by italicizing everything or putting everything in quotes because they cannot remember which is which. Tab that page in your Turabian manual. You will reference it more than you think. You will reference it a lot until you learn it by heart.
The APA Abyss
APA is meticulous. It is not trying to be difficult. It is trying to be precise, because precision matters in empirical research, and the citation style reflects that value. But precise and intuitive are not the same thing, and there are several places where APA will absolutely expose you if you are not paying attention. And if you are making the transition from Turabian into APA, it slaps.
Author formatting will make you question everything you know about names.
In APA, authors are listed in the reference list as Last name, First initial. Middle initial. No full first names. If you have spent your whole life believing that using someone’s full name is a sign of respect, APA is going to require you to let that go.
Here is where the 7th edition changed things significantly from the 6th. In-text, you use et al. for sources with three or more authors. In the reference list, however, you list up to twenty authors before using an ellipsis and the final author’s name. The 6th edition had a different threshold. If you learned APA before 2020, you may be operating on outdated guidance and not know it. This is a good reason to own the current manual.
Title casing in the reference list is counterintuitive and consistent.
In APA, article titles and book titles in the reference list use sentence case. Only the first word of the title, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalized. Everything else is lowercase. This will feel wrong the first hundred times you do it, because most of your instincts around academic writing push you toward capitalizing Important Things.
But here is the twist: journal titles stay in title case. So your reference entry will have a lowercase article title sitting inside an italicized title-case journal name, and if you do not know the rule, the whole thing looks like an error. This is not an error. This is APA doing exactly what APA does. It makes me cringe every time I have to do it. I like a good proper capital letter in a title.
The DOI is not optional, and it is not plain text.
If a source has a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), you include it in the reference. Every time, not just when you used one of those citation generators. You need to have it included at the end of every entry. And in a digital submission, it needs to be a live hyperlink, not just typed text. APA 7th edition is explicit about this, and a surprising number of people are still formatting DOIs as plain text or skipping them when they exist. Including myself when I first started doing APA again.
If a source does not have a DOI but is available online, you include the URL. If the source is a physical book with no digital version, no DOI or URL is needed. But do not skip the DOI because you do not feel like finding it. It exists to make your sources traceable, which is the entire point of citations in the first place.
In-text citations need the year. Direct quotes need the page.
This one sounds obvious and still shows up constantly as a mistake. APA parenthetical citations include the author’s last name and the year of publication: (Coen, 2024). When you are paraphrasing, that is sufficient. When you are quoting directly, you also need the page number: (Coen, 2024, p. 47). Forgetting the year entirely, or forgetting the page on a direct quote, are two of the most common in-text citation errors in student writing. They are also two of the easiest to fix if you build the habit early.
Your in-text citations and your reference list must match exactly.
This is both the simplest and most violated rule in APA formatting. Every source you cite in the text must appear in the reference list. Every entry in the reference list must have a corresponding in-text citation. If you cited Johnson (2021) twice in your paper, Johnson (2021) appears once in the reference list. If you have a source in your reference list that you never actually cited in the text, it should not be there at all. The reference list in APA is not a bibliography in the traditional sense. It is a curated list of only what you used, and it has to match.
Why Any of This Matters
I want to be honest with you about something. There were days early in my master’s program where citation formatting felt like an arbitrary hoop to jump through. Both in my graduate work for education and theology. It can feel like someone somewhere had decided that the height of intellectual achievement was memorizing where to put a period versus a comma.
But I have come to see it differently, and I think the shift happened somewhere around the time I started doing serious research.
Citations are a chain. Every source you cite in a paper is a link that connects your argument to the broader conversation happening in your field. When the chain is intact and correctly labeled, a reader can follow it. They can pull your sources, verify your claims, and engage with the same material you engaged with. In a world where information is everywhere and accountability is scarce, the ability to trace a claim back to its origin is genuinely important. Academic citation culture, for all its quirks, exists to preserve that traceability.
And practically speaking, getting citations right signals something to your professors and peers. It tells them you take the work seriously. It tells them you have learned to be precise. Precision in citation is a small thing. But it reflects a larger habit of mind that doctoral work is actually trying to build in you.
I am still learning. I still open my APA manual with a kind of wary respect, the way you might open a conversation with someone who is smarter than you and knows it. But I am getting better, and you will too.
Buy the manuals. Tab the pages. And know that every correctly formatted reference is a small act of academic integrity that adds up over time.
One footnote at a time. Or, you know, one hyperlinked DOI.
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