APA Title Case Rules – What to Capitalize in APA 7

APA style, now in its seventh edition, is used across psychology, education, nursing, business and most of the social sciences. Its title case rule is unusual among style guides because it is almost entirely mechanical. You do not need to know what part of speech a word is. You mostly need to count letters.

The rule in one paragraph

Capitalize the first word of the title and of any subtitle. Capitalize every major word. Capitalize every word of four letters or more, whatever it is. Lowercase only the minor words: short conjunctions, short prepositions and all articles, where "short" means three letters or fewer. Capitalize the first word after a colon, an em dash or any end punctuation inside a heading. Capitalize both parts of a hyphenated major word.

That is the whole rule. Everything below is detail.

Major words

APA counts as major: nouns, verbs (including linking verbs such as Is, Are, Was, Be), adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and any word of four letters or more. That last clause is what makes APA different. In Chicago, between stays lowercase because it is a preposition. In APA, Between is capitalized because it has seven letters.

• Differences Between Morning and Evening Study Sessions
• Working With Parents of Children With Autism
• Learning From Mistakes Is Not Automatic

Note Is in that last example. It is only two letters, but it is a verb, and verbs are always major.

Minor words

Lowercase these in the middle of a title:

• Articles: a, an, the
• Short conjunctions: and, as, but, for, if, nor, or, so, yet
• Short prepositions: at, by, for, in, of, off, on, per, to, up, via

"In the middle" matters. A minor word is capitalized when it is the first word of the title or subtitle, and most editors also capitalize it as the last word, though APA 7 itself is silent on the last word. The capitalization tool capitalizes the final word for APA, which matches what the overwhelming majority of journals do.

After a colon or dash

The first word after a colon is capitalized even if it is minor: Sleep and Memory: A Review of the Evidence. The same applies after an em dash and after a question mark or exclamation mark inside a title. This is the rule people most often miss when they capitalize by hand, because the eye reads a as a small word and skips it.

Hyphenated words

APA 7 capitalizes the second part of a hyphenated compound when it is a major word: Self-Report Measures, Long-Term Outcomes, Mother–Infant Attachment. Where the second part is a minor word, it stays lowercase, which is why Follow-up is written that way in APA headings while Cross-Sectional gets two capitals. The tool follows the same logic, so paste a follow-up study of long-term outcomes and watch what happens to each hyphen.

Where APA uses sentence case instead

This is the part that costs students marks. APA uses title case for:

• The title on the title page and at the top of the paper
• All five levels of heading inside the paper
• The names of journals, newspapers and magazines in the reference list
• Titles of works mentioned in the body text
• Table titles and figure titles

and sentence case for:

• Titles of articles, books, reports, webpages and chapters in the reference list
• Column headings inside tables
• The text of notes and captions

So an article called Working Memory and Reading Comprehension in Early Readers is written exactly like that in your text, but appears as Working memory and reading comprehension in early readers in the reference list, followed by the journal name in title case and italics. Both versions in one document is correct. One version everywhere is not.

Worked examples

• the effect of sleep on memory consolidation in adults → The Effect of Sleep on Memory Consolidation in Adults
• what we know about bilingual education: a meta-analysis → What We Know About Bilingual Education: A Meta-Analysis
• coping with stress during the first year of nursing → Coping With Stress During the First Year of Nursing
• is screen time harmful for children under five? → Is Screen Time Harmful for Children Under Five?

In the second example, About and Meta-Analysis both get capitals: one because it has five letters, the other because the word after a hyphen is a noun. In the third, With and During are capitalized for length while of stays small. In the last one, for is three letters and stays small, while Under is five and does not.

A checklist

1. Capital on the first word, and on the first word after any colon or dash.
2. Capital on every word of four or more letters. Do not stop to ask what kind of word it is.
3. Capital on every verb, however short.
4. Lowercase on the three-letter-or-shorter articles, conjunctions and prepositions.
5. Capital on the second half of a hyphenated word if that half is a noun, verb, adjective or adverb.
6. Check whether this title belongs in the reference list. If it does and it is not a journal name, switch to sentence case.

Or paste it into the title capitalization tool with APA selected and skip steps one to five.