Getting Your Paper into APSA Format Without Losing Your Mind
APSA format is simpler than Chicago style but that doesn't mean it's forgiving. I used to underestimate it, and I once got a manuscript returned by a journal not for content but because my footnotes were formatted as endnotes in the wrong font. The fix was trivial once I knew what to look for, but it cost me three weeks of delays. The APSA citation style uses author-date in-text citations and a reference list at the end. Footnotes are for commentary only, not for citations. That distinction matters more than most people realize when they switch from Chicago-style training. The reference list entry for a journal article follows this pattern: author last name, first name. Year. "Article Title." Journal Name volume number (issue number): page range. A book looks like this: author last name, first name. Year. Book Title. Place of publication: Publisher. The in-text citation is straightforward too. Put the author's last name and the year in parentheses, or weave them into the sentence itself. If you're citing a specific page, add it after the year with a comma. I typically write something like (Smith 2019, 45) when I need to point to an exact passage, and (Smith 2019) when I'm referencing the general argument.
There are some details that trip people up regularly. Multiple authors get listed fully in the reference list, which is different from Chicago's treatment of works with more than three authors. The ampersand goes in parenthetical citations but "and" goes in narrative citations. So you'd write Smith and Jones (2020) in running text but (Smith and Jones 2020) in parentheses. Yes, APSA uses "and" even in parenthetical references, unlike APA which switches to an ampersand. That difference alone has caused more incorrectly formatted papers than almost anything else I see.
A Practical Walk-Through of a Full Reference
Let me walk through a concrete example. Say you're citing a political science journal article: Sarah Mitchell wrote a piece in 2021 about voter turnout in the American Political Science Review, volume 15, issue 3, pages 412 through 430. The reference list entry would read: Mitchell, Sarah. 2021. "Institutional Design and Voter Participation." American Political Science Review 15 (3): 412-30. The in-text citation would be (Mitchell 2021) or (Mitchell 2021, 425) if you're referencing a specific page. For a book, the format shifts slightly. Here's one: Jacob Rivera published a book called The Logic of Protest in 2018 through Cambridge University Press. The entry would be: Rivera, Jacob. 2018. The Logic of Protest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Note there is no place of publication required for well-known university presses, but for regional or smaller publishers you still need to include the city. This is where style guides start to disagree, and APSA generally expects the city for anything that isn't a major academic publisher. I once spent an afternoon tracking down whether "NYU Press" required a location in the reference list. The answer turned out to be that APSA does not explicitly require it, but several journals that accept APSA format prefer you to include "New York" anyway. When in doubt, check the target journal's author guidelines rather than assuming the style guide alone will cover it.
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How I Actually Produce an APSA-Formatted Paper Now
My workflow starts with Zotero, using the APSA citation style that's available in their style repository. I set the locale to English from the start because APSA has specific rules around article titles that differ slightly in other language contexts. The automatic italics on journal names and book titles happen without fuss once the style is loaded. The one area where Zotero consistently messes things up is the capitalization of article titles. APSA uses sentence case for article titles, meaning only the first word and any proper nouns get capitalized. Zotero sometimes defaults to title case depending on the source you import from. I catch this during a final pass where I go through every reference individually rather than trusting the converter. That step takes me about twenty minutes for a paper with thirty references and prevents the kind of embarrassment that comes from having "The Rise and Fall of Democratic Institutions" capitalized as "The Rise And Fall Of Democratic Institutions." For the in-text citations, I use Zotero's insert citation function and it handles the heavy lifting. But I always check that the year matches the reference list, because I've seen mismatched years happen when a source gets updated or when there's a second edition involved. The style doesn't have special rules for second editions that differ from Chicago, so you'd write: Author Lastname, Firstname. 2020. Book Title. 2nd ed. Place: Publisher.
The Edge Case That Almost Ruined My Dissertation
When I was working on my dissertation, I had to cite a dataset from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The citation format for digital datasets isn't the clearest part of the APSA guide. I tried a bunch of variations that looked reasonable but weren't quite right. The workaround I landed on was treating it similarly to a book chapter with the URL or DOI appended at the end: Author or Collecting Organization. Year. "Dataset Title." Version number. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. DOI or URL. I verified this against an actual published article in APSA's own journal that cited the same dataset. That's the best way to handle ambiguous cases. Look at recent publications in the venue where you plan to submit and copy their formatting choices. Style guides leave room for interpretation, and the accepted convention in your field matters more than the literal text of the manual.
Pitfalls That Waste Time
One thing that costs people a lot of time is the handling of legal materials. If your paper cites court cases, statutes, or treaties, APSA has its own rules that overlap with but don't fully align with the Bluebook. A Supreme Court case citation in APSA includes the volume, reporter abbreviation, first page, and year in parentheses. Something like Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). The parentheses around the year are easy to miss if you're coming from a legal writing background where that's not standard. Another common issue is shortening citations after the first full reference. APSA does allow shortened citations in footnotes, which is useful when you're citing the same source repeatedly. You'd write something like Smith 2019, 45 in the first footnote and then Smith 2021, 78 in a later one if it's a different work. But the reference list still contains the full entry for each work, regardless of how many times you cite it. Some students try to omit repeated references from the bibliography to save space, and that's just not permitted under APSA rules. Quotation marks versus italics for titles is another area where people second-guess themselves. Article titles and chapter titles go in quotation marks. Book titles and journal names get italicized. I've seen both conventions mixed within the same paper, usually because the writer started in one discipline and migrated to another. It's an easy fix but looks sloppy if an editor spots it before you do.
When APSA Format Falls Short
APSA format works well for political science papers that are primarily qualitative or theoretical. It handles multiple citations and nuanced commentary reasonably cleanly. But it has real limitations for certain kinds of work. If you're doing heavy quantitative analysis with dozens of statistical tables and a long list of secondary sources, the footnote-based system becomes unwieldy. Some political scientists in that position switch to APA or Chicago author-date and note it in their methodology section. The editors usually don't care as long as you're internally consistent. The style also doesn't handle non-English sources particularly well. If your bibliography includes works in French, Spanish, or Arabic, the transliteration and translation conventions are under-specified in the APSA guide. I've just gone with whatever the target journal's recent issues do rather than trying to derive a rule from the manual. It's not ideal, but it's practical. For those situations, Chicago author-date might be a better default if your institution or target journal is comfortable with it. It has more detailed guidance on non-English sources and a slightly more flexible footnote system. The tradeoff is that it requires more attention to punctuation details that APSA handwaves away.
Getting the Format Right on the First Try
The most efficient approach is to download the official APSA style guide and keep it open while you write. The current version is the fifth edition, published in 2017, and it covers most of what you'll encounter. You can find it through the APSA website or academic book retailers. Once you have the guide, install the APSA citation style in whatever reference manager you use, create a test document, and generate a citation to make sure everything renders correctly before you invest time in a full paper. A checklist I use before submission: verify that every in-text citation has a matching reference list entry and vice versa, confirm that all article titles are in sentence case, check that journal names are italicized and volume numbers are not in parentheses, make sure multiple authors are listed fully in the reference list, and scan for any footnotes that accidentally contain citations instead of commentary. Running through these five items takes about ten minutes and catches the vast majority of errors. The format itself is not difficult. It's the accumulated small mistakes that tend to stand out in peer review. Get the basics right early and you won't spend weeks fixing citations after your paper has already been written.
