TL;DR: APA 7 is an author-date system: a short pointer in the text, a full entry in the reference list, and the two must match exactly. The rules Philippine students most often get wrong are all 7th-edition changes: three or more authors take et al. from the very first citation, reference lists run to 20 named authors, no period goes after a DOI or URL, and student papers need no running head. DepEd does not mandate APA at all. Its Practical Research curriculum guides accept APA, MLA or Chicago, and the choice belongs to your school. APA also has no Philippine template for DepEd orders or Republic Acts, so those are usually cited as government reports.
Almost every Philippine research subject asks for citations "in APA format", and almost nobody says which APA. The 7th edition of the Publication Manual came out in 2020 and changed several of the rules that older Philippine department handouts still teach. If you learned citation from a photocopied handout, there is a fair chance you are working from the 6th edition without knowing it.
This guide covers the mechanics that actually get marked, then works through the source types Philippine students cite that no American style guide has an example for.
Does DepEd Actually Require APA?
No, and this is worth knowing before you argue with anyone about it. The DepEd curriculum guides for Practical Research 1 and Practical Research 2 phrase the competency identically: the learner "cites related literature using standard style (APA, MLA or Chicago Manual of Style)". Three styles, named, all acceptable at the national curriculum level.
What that means in practice is that the requirement to use APA comes from your school, your department, or your research teacher. So does the edition. So does every local variation on top of it, and Philippine department manuals do add variations, particularly on title pages, abstracts and the ordering of preliminary pages. Ask for the manual in writing at the start of the term, not the week before submission.
Disclaimer: department manuals are revised without announcement and differ between colleges within the same university. Where this guide and your manual disagree, the manual wins.
How Do APA 7 In-Text Citations Work?
APA 7 is an author-date system, which means the in-text citation carries only enough information to find the full entry in your reference list: the surname and the year. Every in-text citation must have a matching reference entry, and every reference entry must be cited at least once in the text. Panels check this both ways.
| Number of authors | In-text form | Example |
|---|---|---|
| One | Surname, year | (Bautista, 2020) |
| Two | Both surnames every time, joined by an ampersand inside parentheses | (Bautista & Reyes, 2020) |
| Three or more | First surname plus et al., from the first citation | (Bautista et al., 2020) |
| Group author with a known abbreviation | Full name first, abbreviation after | (Department of Education [DepEd], 2019), then (DepEd, 2019) |
| No named author | Shortened title in place of the author | ("Enrolment Trends," 2024) |
The three-or-more rule is the one that trips people up. Under APA 6 you wrote out every author the first time and shortened later; under APA 7 you shorten from the start. There is one exception: if two different works both shorten to the same "et al." form, write out as many names as it takes to tell them apart, every time.
Citations also come in two shapes, and mixing them well is what makes a literature review readable rather than a list:
- Parenthetical: Enrolment in the Academic Track has grown steadily since 2016 (Bautista et al., 2020).
- Narrative: Bautista et al. (2020) found that enrolment in the Academic Track has grown steadily since 2016.
For a direct quotation, add the page or paragraph number: (Bautista et al., 2020, p. 44). For a source with no pagination, use a paragraph number or a section heading instead.
How Do You Build an APA 7 Reference Entry?
Every reference entry answers four questions in a fixed order: who, when, what, where. Author, date, title, source. Once you see the pattern, most entries assemble themselves.
The formatting rules that get marked mechanically:
- Hanging indent of 0.5 inch on the whole list. First line flush left, every following line indented.
- Double-spaced throughout, with no extra blank lines between entries.
- Alphabetical by the first author's surname.
- Up to 20 authors are named in full, with an ampersand before the last. Past 20, give the first 19, an ellipsis, then the final author.
- No period after a DOI or URL, because the period can break the link.
- Never give both a DOI and a URL for the same source. If there is a DOI, use it.
- DOIs are written as full addresses: https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx, not the bare string.
Worked examples of the four source types that make up most Philippine student reference lists:
Journal article with a DOI
Bautista, M. A., Reyes, J. C., & Cruz, L. P. (2021). Reading comprehension and track choice among senior high school learners. Philippine Journal of Education Research, 12(2), 45-61. https://doi.org/10.xxxx/pjer.2021.1202
Book
Santos, R. D. (2019). Research methods for Philippine social science (2nd ed.). University Press.
Chapter in an edited book
Dela Cruz, A. B. (2022). Sampling in small-school research. In M. L. Garcia (Ed.), Doing education research in the provinces (pp. 88-104). University Press.
Web page with a group author
Philippine Statistics Authority. (2024, June 6). Functional literacy, education and mass media survey [Data release]. https://psa.gov.ph
Note the last one: when the author and the publisher are the same organisation, you do not repeat the name in the source position. That is a genuine APA rule and it saves a lot of clumsy entries when you cite government agencies, which Philippine students do constantly.
How Do You Cite a DepEd Order or a Republic Act?
Here is the honest answer that most citation generators will not give you: APA Style has no Philippine template. Chapter 11 of the Publication Manual, which covers legal references, is built on The Bluebook, the American legal citation system, and its examples are United States statutes, cases and regulations. There is no entry for a DepEd Order, a CHED Memorandum Order, a PRC Resolution or a Philippine Republic Act.
Two workable routes exist, and Philippine departments split between them:
| Route | How it looks | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Treat it as a government report | Department of Education. (2019). DepEd Order No. 21, s. 2019: Policy guidelines on the K to 12 basic education program. https://www.deped.gov.ph | The common default in Philippine education and social science papers. Slots cleanly into an author-date reference list. |
| Follow your manual's legal-citation section | Whatever local form the manual prescribes, often modelled on Philippine legal citation | Law, political science and public administration programmes, where a department manual usually does prescribe a form |
The same logic applies to a Republic Act. Cited as a government document it becomes: Republic of the Philippines. (2013). Republic Act No. 10533: Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013. Official Gazette. https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph
In text, both take the group-author form: (Department of Education [DepEd], 2019) and thereafter (DepEd, 2019). If you are unsure which route your department wants, ask, and if nobody can tell you, use the government-report form consistently and say so in a note. Consistency is what a panel actually checks. If you need to find the exact issuance number and title before you cite it, our guide on how to find DepEd orders covers where the official copies live.
How Do You Cite an Unpublished Philippine Thesis?
Local theses are among the most useful sources for a Philippine student paper and among the worst served by citation generators, because most generators only know the published, database-indexed case.
The pattern is author, year, title in italics, the type of work and the awarding institution in square brackets, then where you found it:
Villanueva, K. M. (2023). Time allocation patterns among senior high school researchers in a city division [Unpublished master's thesis]. University of the Philippines Diliman.
If the thesis is in an institutional repository and you can link to it, replace the closing element with the repository name and URL. If you read a bound copy in a library and there is no online record, the unpublished form above is correct, and you should note in your methodology where you consulted it.
Guidance on how to select and synthesise these sources in the first place, rather than just format them, sits in the review of related literature guide.
What Does an APA 7 Student Title Page Need?
The 7th edition split title page rules into a professional version and a student version, and the student version is shorter. A student title page carries the paper title in bold title case, centred in the upper half of the page, then the author name, the affiliation, the course number and name, the instructor name, and the assignment due date.
Two things it does not need:
- A running head. APA 7 dropped the running head requirement for student papers unless the instructor or institution asks for one.
- An abstract. Also not required for student papers unless requested, though Philippine thesis manuals almost always request one. See the research abstract guide for what those manuals require.
And one myth to retire: the 12-word title limit is not an APA 7 rule. The 7th edition sets no word limit at all and asks only that a title be focused and succinct. The 12-word figure is printed in a great many Philippine department handouts, and if yours prints it you should follow it, but do not cite APA 7 as the authority for it. More on what makes a title survive panel review is in the research title guide.
Six Mistakes Panels Flag Most
- In-text citation with no matching reference entry, or the reverse. Check both directions before submitting; it takes ten minutes and it is the first thing a strict panel member does.
- Spelling drift between the citation and the entry. "Dela Cruz" in the text and "De la Cruz" in the list reads as two different people.
- APA 6 habits. Listing all authors on first mention, cutting the reference list at seven authors, adding "Retrieved from" before every URL. All superseded.
- Generator output pasted without checking. Free generators routinely mangle group authors, capitalisation and edition numbers. They are a first draft, not a reference list.
- Sentence case versus title case confusion. Article and book titles in the reference list take sentence case; journal names take title case. The paper's own title on the title page takes title case.
- Secondary citations dressed up as primary ones. If you read about a study in someone else's literature review, cite it as "as cited in" or go find the original. Panels ask about this specifically.
Where Citation Fits in the Wider Paper
Citation mechanics are the last thing you fix and the first thing that gets marked, which is a bad combination. The way to keep it manageable is to build the reference list as you write rather than at the end, and to keep one master file of sources so a work you cite in Chapter 2 has the same entry when it reappears in Chapter 4. The chapter-by-chapter structure most Philippine programmes use is set out in the thesis chapters guide, and the sources you gather early feed directly into your background of the study.
Ready to find the right school? Browse schools or compare programmes, admission requirements and tuition across hundreds of Philippine colleges and universities on SchoolFinderPH.
Sources
- APA Style — Basic principles of citation
- APA Style — Author-date citation system
- APA Style — Reference list setup
- APA Style — Title page setup
- APA Style — Running head or no running head? For student papers, APA Style says bye, bye, bye
- APA Style — How many names to include in an APA Style reference
- DepEd — Practical Research 1 Curriculum Guide (SHS Applied Track)
- DepEd — Practical Research 2 Curriculum Guide (SHS Applied Track)
