Further, APA Style has been adopted by a number of fields as an anchor for their writing, too. The ways of talking and writing about these fields have evolved and changed, and the Publication Manual has changed with them.
The manual has come a long way from its early days, but so has scientific inquiry and thought about health and mental health. There’s information on everything from font type and size to heading structure, language choices, statistics, tables, figures, and (everyone’s favorite!) citation and reference style, along with much, much more, within those hallowed pages. Flash forward to today: We’re up to the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, but the main purpose is still to give people guidance on writing scholarly journal articles. The first version of the publication manual, titled “Instructions in Regard to Preparation of Manuscript,”* was seven pages long (!) and published in 1929 as an article in Psychological Bulletin.
