The acronym APA in English stands for American Phychological Association. In 1929 this entity created homogeneous norms for the edition and presentation of written documents. The purpose of these rules was obvious: to provide common criteria so that documents were written according to uniform rules. The set of these standards is what is known as the APA style or standards.
A group of psychologists and communication experts carefully studied how human beings mentally process the information that appears in documents. Based on this study, a standard adapted to the needs of the readers was created.
Numerous entities, administrations and authors have decided to adopt the APA standards, especially those that refer to the citation of textual references.
In relation to the presentation of a written document, some APA rules are as follows:
1) a 2.54 cm margin,
2) an indentation of five spaces,
3) for the citation it is necessary to enclose quotation marks and mention the author (for example, "I like you when you are silent because you are absent" (Pablo Neruda) and
4) paper size: 8.5 "x 11".
Apart from these specific standards, the APA presents a detailed definition on very diverse matters, such as font size, abbreviations, punctuation, preparation of tables and figures, line spacing, citation of authors, etc. Obviously, all these references are very useful in research papers, monographs or thesis.
Thanks to the APA standards, the international scientific community can communicate and understand better and, in parallel, readers around the world share identical criteria to correctly interpret the information that appears in written documents.
APA Publications Manual
The entire set of standards is collected in a manual, which in the Anglo-Saxon world is known as the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association". This publication is not only intended to disclose the standard for presenting documents, but the standards are periodically reviewed and updated. This constant reissue has a lot to do with the emergence of new technologies.
In this sense, its last edition dates from 2016 and is the sixth edition since 1929. On the other hand, the APA publishes a weekly publication where different technical aspects related to the editing of texts and documents are presented.
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