APA style grew from a seven-page memo into a manual with a political edge
In 1929 psychologists printed a seven-page guide for authors. That modest memo became the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, now in its seventh edition and followed by hundreds of journals. Along the way it began steering how scholars write about gender, race and disability, not just where the commas go.
The association entered journal publishing in 1923. Its committee's short guide appeared in the Psychological Bulletin in 1929, followed by a 32-page version in the same journal in 1944. The first official manual, a 61-page supplement, came out in 1952 and is usually taken as the birth of APA style. Revisions followed in 1957 and 1967, then new editions in 1974, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2009 and 2019. As the guide swelled, its rules grew ever more explicit. Its early editions were shaped by behaviourist leaders, and critics note that the manual has carried that outlook into the many other disciplines that adopted it, from nursing and education to criminal justice.
Language became a signature concern. An addition to the 1974 edition, guidelines on nonsexist language for APA journals, offered practical alternatives to sexist phrasing then common. Those recommendations have since widened to cover age, disability, gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and intersectionality.
The sixth edition, in force from 2009 to 2019, took four years to prepare. A revision task force set up working groups on topics including ethics, statistics and references, and the association justified the quick turnaround by pointing to the rise of online sources. Its launch was bumpy: sample papers in the first printing were riddled with mistakes. Corrections went online on October 1, 2009, an Inside Higher Ed article on October 13 quoted one person calling the errors egregious, and the faulty printing was recalled, even from Amazon, and replaced by a corrected one dated 2010.
The seventh edition, released in October 2019, added student paper formats and standards for qualitative and mixed-methods research. For the first time it tackled accessibility, shortening in-text citations so they are easier for screen-reader users and people with cognitive disabilities.
Source: APA style
