Q. Has the new 7th edition of the APA Style changed much?

APA Style is based on the instructions to format a paper and cite references included in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: the official guide to APA style. The newest 7th edition of this manual was published at the end of 2019, and colleges slowly switched the new edition in 2020. The Berkeley Center for Academic Success has updated the brochure and an online tutorial to the new APA style. This FAQ is for those of you who were familiar with older version of APA (APA 6th), and wonder what has changed.

The old and new versions are very similar for the type of references most students will be using. The main changes are:

APA Format

• Font: APA now allows other fonts besides Times New Roman 12. It recommends 11-point Calibri, 11-point Arial, 10-point Lucida Sans Unicode, 12-point Times New Roman, 11-point Georgia, or 10-point Computer Modern.
• Cover Page: "Running Head" is no longer used in the header of APA papers. For student papers, APA now says only the page number is needed in the right hand corner of the header.
• Titles: Your paper's title on the cover page and first page is now Bold, and written in Title Case. So are most section headings, and the word References on your last page.

References

• Online links: Most web addresses (URLs) at the end of a full reference no longer start with "Retrieved from". Just put the complete link, including http://, as the last item in your complete reference.
• Retrieved Month DD, YYYY from URL is now only used with a date, to refer to when you saw a website that changes frequently, like the COVID-19 cases map.
• DOIs: If the citation uses a DOI instead of an URL, turn it into a link by placing https://doi.org/ before the numbers, like this: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001226
• Webpages: To simplify citing most webpages, APA decided that the Title of a webpage is what should be in italics (not the name or URL of the whole website). But there has not been any change for online versions of journal, magazine or newspaper articles. They follow how you always cited the print version: Author, A. A. (Date). Article title. Journal Name, vol.#(issue #), page ###-###. DOI or URL ¹
• Books/EBooks: The publisher location (City, State) is no longer required for print books or DVDs, just the name of the publisher. For EBooks, you don't need to put the version, such as [Kindle edition], just the URL.
• In-text citations: For articles with more than 3 authors, you should put the first author’s surname and “et al.”, like: (Williams et al., 2018). But list up to 20 authors on the References page.

¹ Lee, C. (2020, February 19). A tale of two reference formats. APA Style Blog. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/two-reference-formats 

Content

• Singular “They”: APA now requires the use of the singular “they” or “their” as a generic pronoun to refer to someone if their gender is unknown or not relevant to what you are writing about. Also use “they” or “their” to refer to individuals who use those as their gender pronouns.

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Be aware that a few library databases have Cite tools that are still using APA 6th edition, not the newest 7th edition. To update them, you can use the guidance here or check the APA 7th Common Reference Examples handout that has 25 samples of formatting different types of references.
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See the links below for more information on the changes, a handout of APA 7th Common Reference Examples, and an example of a Student's APA 7th Paper with annotations explaining everything.