APA 7th edition has been out since 2019. Your professor's formatting preferences are from 2009. The style guide your university's writing center posted is a PDF last updated in 2015. And the citation your classmate shared in the group chat uses rules that haven't been current for six years.
This is the actual state of APA formatting in most academic programs right now. Not confusion about obscure edge cases — confusion about basic, everyday rules that changed between the 6th and 7th editions and never got consistently communicated.
Here's every change that's likely to affect a paper you're writing this semester, with the old rule, the new rule, and an example of each. Flip through the most common ones first:
Flip the switch to see the same rule in each edition. If your paper looks like the left column, it's out of date.
The running head lost its label
APA 6: The first page of your paper included a running head formatted as Running head: YOUR TITLE IN CAPS. Subsequent pages displayed just the title in caps.
APA 7: Drop the words "Running head:" entirely. The running head is just your shortened title in all caps on every page. Same format on page one and every page after.
This is the single most visible change, because it's on the first line of the first page. If your paper starts with "Running head:" you're using APA 6 formatting. Every instructor who knows the difference will notice before they read your first sentence.
Publisher location disappeared from book references
APA 6: Book references included the publisher's city and state (or city and country for international publishers).
Mitchell, J. A. (2017). *Writing for psychology*. New York, NY: Pearson.
APA 7: Publisher location is gone. Just the publisher name.
Mitchell, J. A. (2017). *Writing for psychology*. Pearson.
The rationale is straightforward: in a digital publishing landscape, a publisher's headquarters doesn't tell you anything useful about how to find the source. This change applies to all book and report references — if you're including a city and state after the publisher name, that's APA 6.
The DOI format changed
APA 6: DOIs were formatted with a prefix: doi:10.1037/a0028240
APA 7: DOIs are formatted as full URLs: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028240
This applies everywhere a DOI appears — in your reference list, in footnotes, anywhere. The old doi: prefix format is no longer correct. And unlike a stylistic preference, this one matters for functionality: the URL format is a clickable link. The old prefix format is not.
If the source has a DOI, include it. APA 7 is explicit about this — DOIs are no longer optional for sources that have them.
"Retrieved from" is mostly gone
APA 6: Online sources required "Retrieved from" before the URL.
Retrieved from https://www.example.com/article
APA 7: For most online sources, just provide the URL with no "Retrieved from" prefix. The exception is sources whose content changes over time — wikis, social media profiles, unarchived web pages. For those, use "Retrieved [date], from [URL]."
The practical test: if someone clicking the link six months from now would see the same content, skip "Retrieved from." If the content might change, include the retrieval date.
You can list up to 20 authors before using an ellipsis
APA 6: For sources with more than seven authors, you listed the first six, inserted an ellipsis, and added the last author.
APA 7: The threshold moved to 20. List up to 20 authors. Only when there are 21 or more do you use the ellipsis format — first 19 authors, ellipsis, last author.
This matters most in the sciences, where papers routinely have 10 to 15 authors. Under APA 6, a reference for a 12-author paper would truncate most of the authorship list. Under APA 7, you list all 12.
"Et al." starts at three authors for in-text citations
APA 6: For sources with three to five authors, you wrote out all names the first time you cited the source, then used "et al." for subsequent citations. For six or more authors, you used "et al." from the first citation.
APA 7: For any source with three or more authors, use "et al." from the first citation. No more writing out three, four, or five names the first time.
First citation under APA 6 (four authors): (Smith, Jones, Lee, & Park, 2020) First citation under APA 7 (four authors): (Smith et al., 2020)
This simplifies in-text citations significantly. It also means fewer parenthetical interruptions in your prose — which your reader will appreciate even if they don't know why.
The ampersand rule for in-text citations changed
APA 6: In parenthetical citations, you used "&" between author names. In narrative citations, you used "and."
APA 7: Same rule, but now it only matters for two-author sources, since everything with three or more authors uses "et al." from the start. For two-author works, the rule remains: "&" inside parentheses, "and" in running text.
Parenthetical: (Smith & Jones, 2020) Narrative: Smith and Jones (2020) found that...
Font requirements are flexible now
APA 6: Specified 12-point Times New Roman as the default font.
APA 7: Accepts several fonts, including Calibri 11pt, Arial 11pt, Lucida Sans Unicode 10pt, Times New Roman 12pt, and Georgia 11pt. Computer code can use Courier New 10pt.
This is genuinely useful. Times New Roman at 12 point is not particularly readable on screen, and since most academic writing is now read digitally before (or instead of) being printed, the flexibility matters. Check your department's requirements — some still mandate Times New Roman regardless of what APA says.
Bold headings replaced some italic ones
APA 6 Level 3 heading: Indented, italic, lowercase, ending with a period. Text continued on the same line.
APA 7 Level 3 heading: Indented, Bold Italic, Title Case, Ending With a Period. Text continues on the same line.
The full heading structure changed at multiple levels, and the differences are specific enough that the easiest approach is to look up the APA 7 heading format chart directly. If you're using a template, make sure it's an APA 7 template — APA 6 templates are still circulating on university writing center websites.
Singular "they" is endorsed
APA 7 formally endorses the use of singular "they" as a pronoun — both for individuals who use "they/them" pronouns and as a generic third-person singular when gender is unknown or irrelevant.
APA 6 didn't address this directly, which left writers defaulting to "he or she" constructions or awkwardly restructuring sentences to avoid the question. APA 7 settles it: singular "they" is grammatically and stylistically acceptable.
The changes that don't matter as much as people think
A few APA 7 changes show up in every comparison article but rarely affect a typical student paper:
Annotations for reprinted or republished works. APA 7 added specific citation formats for reprinted and republished works. Unless you're citing a book originally published in 1890 and reprinted in 2015, this won't come up.
Classroom or intranet sources. APA 7 allows citation of sources with limited circulation, like lecture notes or internal company documents. Useful in professional contexts, rare in most student papers.
Updated guidelines for audiovisual sources. Podcasts, YouTube videos, TED Talks, and social media posts all have specific formats in APA 7. These are worth knowing if you cite them, but they're not changes from APA 6 — they're additions to cover source types that didn't exist or weren't common when APA 6 was written.
A quick check for your next paper
Before you submit, run through this list:
- Running head: Does it say "Running head:" on page one? Remove it.
- Book references: Do any include a publisher city/state? Remove the location.
- DOIs: Are they formatted as
doi:10.xxxxorhttps://doi.org/10.xxxx? Use the URL format. - URLs: Do any start with "Retrieved from" for stable web sources? Remove it.
- Author lists: Did you truncate at seven authors? The limit is now 20.
- In-text citations: Did you write out three to five author names on first use? Use "et al." from the start for three or more.
- Font: Does your department require Times New Roman, or can you use the APA 7 flexible options?
This takes five minutes and catches the formatting errors that signal "I used the wrong edition" to anyone grading your paper.
The real problem with citation formatting
Here's the thing about all of these changes: they're knowable. They're documented. They're specific. And yet most students get at least one of them wrong, because tracking formatting rules across style editions is exactly the kind of detail work that humans are bad at and software should handle.
If your citation tool is still generating APA 6 formatting — or if you're formatting references by hand and working from a guide that may or may not be current — you are spending time on a problem that should already be solved.
Folio formats your citations in APA 7 (and MLA 9, and Chicago 17) automatically — and keeps them current when style guides update. Try it free.