What You Actually Need to Know About APA 6th Before You Start Writing
The 6th edition of the Publication Manual Of The American Psychological Association 6th Edition is still the default formatting standard at a lot of universities and some journals, even though the 7th came out in 2019. If your advisor, professor, or editor said "APA 6th," you need to know the differences from the newer version because mixing them up is a very common source of rejection or extra edits. I spent three semesters as a writing center tutor and later edited submissions for a psychology graduate program. The most issue was people applying 7th-edition rules to papers that required 6th. It looks minor on the surface, but the deviations add up fast. I once had a student submit a manuscript with "et al." used correctly for in-text citations with three or more authors. Under 6th, that rule didn't exist. The first time you cite three or more authors in 6th, you list every name. On the second and subsequent citations, then you switch to "et al." This one rule alone caused a reviewer to flag the entire reference list format. The fix was a quick pass with Find-and-Replace, but it took 45 minutes to clean up because the paper had 28 sources.
Publication Manual Of The American Psychological Association 6th Edition
Here is how the core mechanics actually work in practice, not the simplified version most online summaries give you. Reference list entries in 6th edition require the publisher location. That means every book citation needs the city and state or country. So a citation for a textbook looks like: Author, A. A. (Year). Title of the book (Edition). Location: Publisher. The 7th edition dropped the city requirement entirely. If you are working in 6th and someone hands you a reference manager output from a 7th-setup, your locations will be missing and you will not notice until a reviewer points it out. For journal articles, 6th requires the volume number to be italicized and the issue number in parentheses without italics. Example: Journal Name, 15(3), 112-130. The issue number parenthetical is italicized in 7th. Again, this is a tiny detail that reviewers catch repeatedly.
DOI formatting in 6th was different. You included the DOI as a URL: doi:10.xxxx/xxxxx. In 7th, DOIs are presented as hyperlinks without the "doi:" prefix. If your style sheet expects 6th and you paste a 7th-format DOI, it looks wrong to someone who knows the manual by heart. Level headings in 6th used five levels with increasingly indented formats. Centered bold, flush left bold, centered bold italic, flush left bold italic, and flush left italic bold. The 7th edition simplified this to just two levels. Most people writing now have never seen all five levels. If you are formatting a long thesis under 6th rules, you need to set up those five heading styles in Word or whatever editor you use before you start writing the document. Doing it retroactively is a nightmare because Word does not always reflow them cleanly. Abstracts in 6th needed the word "Abstract" centered at the top. No page number on the abstract page in some university templates, but the manual itself says pages are numbered starting from the title page. This inconsistency is one of the reasons 6th feels contradictory if you read it cover to cover. The manual says one thing; your department's style guide says another. When that happens, the department guide wins. I learned this the hard way when a dissertation committee chair sent back a perfectly formatted abstract page with a red pen mark saying "remove the page number here."
Where the Manual Falls Short
The 6th edition has real limitations. The section on statistical reporting is outdated for anything beyond basic t-tests and ANOVas. Effect sizes, confidence intervals, and modern regression reporting conventions have evolved since 2009. If you are doing contemporary quantitative research, the manual's guidance on reporting statistics will not cover what your methodology actually requires. Supplement it with the APA's own statistical standards documents or recent methodological papers. Do not rely on the manual alone for stats formatting. Another gap: the manual does not address online sources in the detail they now require. Dataset citations, software references, preprint repositories, and social media sources barely get coverage in 6th. You will need to extrapolate from existing patterns or look at how APA 7th handles these. The 7th edition is significantly better on digital sources. If your project involves heavy reliance on online or gray literature, consider using 7th even if you were originally assigned 6th, and get written approval from your advisor first. Reference management software support for 6th is also spotty. Zotero and EndNote both support it, but Mendeley's APA 6th style has known bugs with hanging indents and capitalization of article titles in journal names. I switched to Zotero specifically because its 6th implementation was more reliable after testing side by side. Check your software's output against a verified sample before you trust it for your full reference list.
Practical Steps That Actually Work
Download the official manual directly from the APA website. The PDF is around 260 pages and covers everything from manuscript structure to ethical guidelines. Some people try to find summaries or cheat sheets instead. Those are fine for quick lookups, but they miss nuance. I always go to the source for anything borderline. The manual's examples are the tiebreaker when two online guides contradict each other. Set up your document template before you write anything. Create the five heading levels, the reference list hanging indent, and the double-spacing. Set margins to exactly one inch on all sides. Use Times New Roman 12-point or the equivalent font size in your chosen typeface. This takes about ten minutes and saves you from realizing halfway through your third chapter that your headings are formatted wrong. When you hit an edge case that the manual does not explicitly cover, look at the nearest analogous example. The manual is not comprehensive on every possible source type. It gives you a framework. If you are citing a podcast episode or a government report, find the closest category in the reference examples and adapt. Do not invent a format. Reviewers can tell when someone made up citation rules.
Run a final check specifically for 6th-versus-7th bleed-over. Search your document for patterns that indicate 7th was accidentally applied: missing publisher locations, italicized issue numbers, "et al." used on first citation of three-plus authors, DOIs formatted as bare URLs without the doi: prefix. A single manual review pass catches about 90 percent of these errors. Automated tools miss the contextual ones. If you need the manual itself, the official copy is available through the American Psychological Association bookstore. Prices vary between the print edition at roughly 70 dollars and the electronic version at around 55 dollars. Some universities provide free access through their library catalogs. Check your institution's subscription before buying a copy. Libraries often have the full text available as a downloadable PDF through platforms like ProQuest or EBSCO. There is also an APA Style website with free resources, examples, and occasional blog posts about nuanced formatting questions. It is not a replacement for the manual but it is useful when you encounter something the manual mentions only briefly. I bookmarked it during my tutoring years and used it more than the manual itself for specific edge cases like citing interviews, unpublished manuscripts, and secondary sources.
The bottom line is that 6th edition is stricter in some ways and looser in others compared to 7th. The publisher location requirement, the five-level heading system, and the "et al." delay rule are the three biggest differences that trip people up. Know those three, verify your software output against a known-good sample, and you will avoid the majority of formatting problems before they reach a reviewer.
