APA (American Psychological Association) and MLA (Modern Language Association) Formatting

APA and MLA Formats

American Psychological Association (APA) is a formatting style commonly used in citing scientific materials with the seventh edition as its latest development. The Modern Language Association (MLA) is used citing humanities, cultural arts, and language arts disciplines. The latest revision of MLA is the eighth edition, which bears the latest developments (“Purdue University,” n.d.). Among others, these formatting styles enhance uniformity and ease in accessing the required information from a document. The APA and the MLA formats have significant differences in their outlines, formats, and citations, which are evident in various components discussed below.

In-Text Citations

In the APA format, in-text citations consist of the publication year and author(s), while MLA format incorporates the author’s name and the page number from which the information is drawn. Moreover, there is a comma between the year of publication and the author in APA, whereas there is none in MLA.

APA: (Wallentin et al., 2020)
MLA: (Wallentin et al. 22)

Cover Pages

The text starts immediately after the student, professor, course and date details in MLA whereas in APA, the title page is located on the separate page.

Headers

In the MLA format, the student’s last name and the page number is placed on the flush right top conner of the page, while in the APA seventh edition, only the page number is used.

Referencing

The word ‘reference(s)’ is used as a title to the sources used in writing the paper, while in MLA, the bibliography page is named as ‘works cited.’

Sources

APA references have the authors’ name(s) first followed by the year of publication, title, and publisher. On the contrary, in MLA, the authors’ name(s) starts, followed by the title, then the publisher, and finally the publication year as shown below.

APA: Wallentin, G., Kaziyeva, D., & Reibersdorfer-Adelsberger, E. (2020). COVID-19 intervention scenarios for a long-term disease management. International Journal of Health Policy and Management, 9(12), 508-516.

MLA: Wallentin, Gudrun, et al. “COVID-19 Intervention Scenarios for A Long-Term Disease Management.” International Journal of Health Policy and Management vol. 9, no.12, 2020, pp. 508-516.

Reference

Purdue University. (n.d.). Purdue Writing Lab. Web.