It is the night before your DNP scholarly project is due, and the reference list will not match your in-text citations. The headings are inconsistent, the title page is a guess and the hanging indent is made of spaces. This guide gives the APA 7 rules in the order you need them: the reference pattern first, then headings, the title page and the graduate cases that cause the most errors.
Most of a graduate reference list is journal articles. The pattern is authors, year, sentence-case title, italic journal name and volume, issue in parentheses, pages, DOI link.
The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition (2020), is the style most graduate nursing handbooks name for capstones, scholarly projects and dissertations. Consistency matters more as papers get longer. A 60-page project with mismatched headings or an uneven reference list is harder for a committee to read and easier to mark down. Some programs and journals prefer AMA or Vancouver, so when your handbook, project template or journal author guidelines differ from the manual, follow them.
About the examples. Every author, journal, organization and link shown here is fictional or a placeholder (DOIs appear as https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx), apart from two well-known published works that are clearly identified. Take the details for your own reference list from the sources in front of you, never from these samples.
APA 7 has five heading levels. Use only as many as the paper needs, and when a section has a subheading it needs at least two at that level. The opening of the paper carries no heading of its own, because the title acts as one.
| Level | Format | Sample |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Centered, bold, Title Case | Methods |
| 2 | Flush left, bold, Title Case | Setting and Participants |
| 3 | Flush left, bold italic, Title Case | Inclusion Criteria |
| 4 | Indented, bold, Title Case, ending with a period; text follows on the same line | Data Sources. The team extracted... |
| 5 | Indented, bold italic, Title Case, ending with a period; text follows on the same line | Chart Audit Tool. Items were... |
Graduate program templates often dictate the Level 1 and Level 2 wording (for example Background, Problem Statement, Project Design). Keep those titles and apply the APA formatting to them.
Unless your program provides its own cover page, a student paper's title page carries, in this order:
Student papers do not need a running head unless your instructor requests one. DNP and dissertation templates frequently add lines such as committee chair or degree, so let the template take priority.
Ask for your citations and reference list to be formatted to APA 7. You see the price before you pay, and revisions are free for 14 days after delivery.
Each idea, figure or quotation that came from a source needs a short citation that matches an entry in the reference list. These are the patterns you will use most; the APA in-text guide handles the unusual cases.
| Source | Parenthetical | Narrative |
|---|---|---|
| One author | (Haldane, 2023) | Haldane (2023) |
| Two authors | (Ibarra & Voss, 2022) | Ibarra and Voss (2022) |
| Three or more authors | (Castellanos et al., 2021) | Castellanos et al. (2021) |
| Group author | (Northfield Nurse Leadership Alliance [NNLA], 2024) | The Northfield Nurse Leadership Alliance (NNLA, 2024) |
Order same-year entries by title and add the letters after the year, both in the list and in the text. Cases with their own rules have dedicated guides: clinical practice guidelines, datasets, dissertations and DNP projects, and grey literature.
| Mistake | Fix |
|---|---|
| Article titles in Title Case in the reference list | Use sentence case; keep Title Case for the journal name |
| Listing every author in text for a source with three or more | Use the first author and "et al." from the first citation |
| Citing a database as the source | Cite the journal, book or report itself |
| Writing "doi:" or "DOI:" before a number | Write the DOI as a complete https://doi.org/ link |
| Letting an unmarked paragraph of paraphrase run on | Cite at the start of the idea and again whenever it would be unclear whose idea comes next |
| Building the hanging indent with spaces | Set it once in the paragraph settings |
Academic integrity. Attribute all borrowed work and keep to your institution's academic-integrity policy; the plagiarism guide explains how. For the official rules, consult the APA Style website.
Most programs hand you a template that answers this. Where the template is silent, the student format applies to coursework. A manuscript you later submit to a journal follows that journal's author guidelines, which usually build on the professional format.
That is set by your program or assignment, not by APA. Ask your instructor or chair, or read the assignment instructions.
Name the original in the text and add "as cited in" with the article you actually read; only the article you read goes in the reference list. Details are in the in-text guide.