What is an abstract in APA and how to format it?

Although APA 7th edition does not usually require students to draw an abstract of their work, yet it remains a requirement for other professionals to create an abstract of their papers. While the abstract plays an important role in attracting the readers to read your paper, it is not a sales pitch. The abstract should, therefore, reflect accurately what you have discussed in your paper. It needs to be a concise, and comprehensive summary of the paper.

The abstract of the paper is, in fact, a showcase of the paper. In the abstract, a writer describes the issues which were explored, the method used to explore those issues and the results or conclusions of the research.

The Publication Manual provides some guidance to create a good abstract of the paper. It stresses the need for accuracy, being non-evaluative—no opinion or comments, being coherent and readable and being concise.

Largely, the abstract page is formatted just like any other APA paper, e.g. 12pt font and double spaced. It should not be more than 250 words in length. It needs to be placed on a page, immediately after the title page and labelled with a bold, centre-justified ‘Abstract’ at the top of the page.

The abstract can be presented in two ways: Paragraph format and Structured format. Paragraph format is more common with student papers, which is a single paragraph with no indentation on the first line. The structured format requires the insertion of specific labels to identify the different parts of the abstract.

Any paper submitted to an APA journal needs three to five keywords, to be placed on the abstract page, one line below it. It begins with the label ‘Keywords’: followed by keywords in lowercase, italicised, and indented 0.5in (1.27cm) from the margin. https://www.easybib.com/guides/citation-guides/apa-format/how-to-write-an-abstract-apa/

Keywords: abstract, apa 7th edition, formatting

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