Creating A Nursing Research Paper In The APA Format Step By Step
What is the APA format?
APA stands for American Psychological Association. This is an organization, which in this context, is responsible for defining a format in which all papers in behavioral science research has to be submitted. It is a very specific format, in the 6th edition, which is to be followed in all research papers in behavioral sciences. The features that are mentioned in the format are
- The page number appears at the top right of every page, at a 12 inch margin.
- There is a 1 inch margin on the left and right side, as well as the bottom.
- The title, authors name and all subtitles are to be centre aligned.
- The starting of all paragraphs is to be indented, except the abstract.
- All lines should have double spacing, including the title and authors name.
- The whole paper should be typed in Times New Roman font face with 12 font size.
- The font size of the title should be bigger.
- Proper font highlighting like bold, italics and underline are required wherever necessary.
There are many other such small features that one needs to take care of while writing, but this is the basic idea of the APA format.
Nursing paper and how to put it in APA format step by step
There are many recent and relevant topics in nursing that you can have as your topic and on which you need to submit your paper. The topics are mostly related to ethics. When you are about to submit your work you need to do it so in the APA format. Here are a few steps that will help you do so.
- If you try to write the whole thing in APA format, you will most probably fail. Write down the whole thing first and then convert it to the APA format.
- When you convert your paper into APA format, do it stepwise.
- First, do the overall formatting, that is, set the page margin, the page numbers, the font face and size, line spacing etc.
- Then do the formatting page by page. First get the cover page, that is, the page containing the title and synopsis in the correct format, then move on to the abstract page and so on.
- When you are done with the basic formatting, move on to other details, like highlighting etc.