We’re excited to announce the arrival of the APA 7th Edition to PERRLA Online. Now, you can create perfectly formatted 7th Edition APA papers in both PERRLA Online and our PERRLA for Word Add-in.
There are three major changes for APA 7th Edition papers you’ll need to know about:
First, we’ve added Paper Types so you can create Discussion Posts, Students Papers, and Professional Papers.
Second, we’ve improved the interface, making it consistent with our PERRLA for Word Add-in.
And third, we’ve made it incredibly fast and easy to create references with an Auto-fill Reference Search feature.
Paper Types
The APA 7th Edition added two variations of the standard paper: Student Research Papers and Professional Research Papers. You can now create both of these paper types in PERRLA Online. Also, we’ve added the ability to create Discussion Posts in APA 7 as well.
Select the paper type when you create a new APA 7th Edition paper using the tabs across the top of the create window. Both Student and Professional Research Papers include a title page, body pages, and a references page. Professional papers also include an abstract by default. Discussion Posts only include the body and references on a single page - to make it easy to copy and paste it into your class forums.
Consistent Interface
We’ve updated the interface so it’s easier to navigate, takes up less space, and is consistent with our PERRLA for Word Add-in.
The new ribbon across the top of the Paper Editor contains icons for the ways you interact with your paper. Each of the icons open a corresponding side-panel in the editor. There are icons for the Title Page, Abstract, Table of Contents, References & Citations, Text & Heading styles, Figures, & Tables. In addition to these, you can also open the Help Center in a new tab or manually adjust your text.
We still have a menubar across the top with access to a number of the smaller features like Page Count, Special Characters, and Reference annotations.
However, we’ve added the ability to download or print your paper directly from inside the Editor in the File menu option. You can still download and print your paper from the Export/Print tab as well - and we’ve made the options less confusing. Now, whatever you see in the editor is what you get in your final paper.
With this update for APA 7th Edition, PERRLA Online and PERRLA for Word now use the same interface and layout in both places.
Updated Reference Engine
You can re-use references you created for your APA 6th Edition papers. As you add these older references to your new APA 7th Edition papers, we’ll walk you through the conversion process - which is really just making sure the information is filled in correctly.
We’ve rebuilt the reference engine for the APA 7th Edition to be much faster and simpler.
We’ve also streamlined the reference form to eliminate the yes/no questions that could be confusing.
Now, insert whatever data you can find for your reference and PERRLA will format it correctly - no matter how much or how little you provide.
The most commonly used data fields for each reference type are now marked in a blue outline so you’ll know which fields are the most important and, therefore, the ones you should try to fill in.
We’ve also added a Live Preview at the bottom of the reference form so you’ll know exactly what your reference is going to look like before you move to the next step.
APA 7th Edition Papers now have the ability to customize citations. When creating a citation, you can choose the parts of the citation you want to include. For example, if the author’s name is already in the sentence you’re citing, just uncheck “Contributor’s name” and we’ll leave it out of the citation. As before, you can always edit your citations or adjust the components of the citation at any point.
Search for references using Auto-fill
For APA 7th Edition papers, you can now create references for books, journal articles, and websites by doing an online search from within our software!
When you start to create a reference, instead of choosing a reference type to begin manual data entry, you can now search for your reference using a DOI, an ISBN, a URL, or the author’s name and title.
PERRLA will collect as much information for that reference as we can and then we’ll display a list of the references we’ve found that matched your search. Choose the one you want and we’ll enter it’s information into the Reference form for you.
If you search with a unique identifier that can only represent one reference… like a DOI, ISBN, or URL, we’ll take you directly into the Reference form with the data we found.
On the pre-filled Reference form, you can edit or tweak the reference and see a live preview of it at the bottom before adding it to your paper.