# APA 7th Edition Citation Template Use this template when the user requests APA format, or when they do not specify a format. APA 7th is the default for social sciences and most CS journals outside of IEEE venues. ## Citation Format Rules ### In-text citations - **Single author**: `(Vaswani, 2017)` or `Vaswani (2017) showed that...` - **Two authors**: `(Vaswani & Shazeer, 2017)` — use `&` inside parentheses, "and" in running text. - **Three or more authors**: `(Vaswani et al., 2017)` — use `et al.` from the first citation onward (APA 7th changed this from APA 6th). - **Multiple citations**: `(Vaswani et al., 2017; Devlin et al., 2018)` — alphabetical order, separated by semicolons. ### Reference list entry for arXiv preprints arXiv papers are preprints, not formally published articles. Cite them as preprints with the arXiv identifier: ``` Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of the paper. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/ARXIV_ID ``` **Real example** (from paper metadata `{id: "1706.03762", title: "Attention Is All You Need", authors: ["Ashish Vaswani", "Noam Shazeer", "Niki Parmar", "Jakob Uszkoreit", "Llion Jones", "Aidan N. Gomez", "Łukasz Kaiser", "Illia Polosukhin"], published: "2017-06-12"}`): ``` Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ``` Formatting rules: - **Author names**: `LastName, FirstInitial.` (middle initial optional). Join with commas; last author gets an `&`. - **Year**: the `published` field's year, in parentheses. - **Title**: sentence case (only first word and proper nouns capitalized). Italicize titles in typeset output; in plain markdown, leave plain. - **Source**: the literal word `arXiv`, then the full abs URL. - **No DOI** unless the paper has also been published in a venue with a DOI. arXiv alone uses the URL. ### Special cases - **Up to 20 authors**: list all of them separated by commas, with `&` before the last. - **21 or more authors**: list the first 19, then `...`, then the final author. - **No DOI and no URL**: not possible for arXiv papers; always use the `abs_url` from the paper metadata. ## Report Structure Follow this structure verbatim when writing the SLR report body. Fill in content from your Phase 3 extraction and Phase 4 synthesis. ```markdown # Systematic Literature Review: **Date**: **Papers surveyed**: **Scope**: **Citation format**: APA 7th edition ## Executive Summary <3-5 sentences summarizing the state of the literature on this topic. What do the surveyed papers collectively tell us? What is the shape of the field? Avoid listing papers — synthesize.> ## Methodology This review surveyed arXiv papers retrieved on using the query ``<, filtered to category ><, published between and >. Papers were sorted by and the top were included. Metadata extraction (research question, methodology, key findings, limitations) was performed by language-model agents, with cross-paper synthesis performed by the lead agent. **Limitations of this review**: arXiv preprints are not peer-reviewed; some included papers may not reflect their final published form. Coverage is limited to arXiv — papers published directly in venues without arXiv preprints are not represented. ## Themes <3-6 thematic sections. Each theme is a recurring research direction, problem framing, or methodological approach across the surveyed papers.> ### Theme 1: <2-4 paragraphs describing this theme. Cite papers inline as you discuss them, e.g. "Vaswani et al. (2017) introduced X, while subsequent work (Devlin et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019) extended it to Y." Do not just list papers — describe the intellectual thread that connects them.> ### Theme 2: <...> ## Convergences and Disagreements **Convergences**: **Disagreements**: ## Gaps and Open Questions ## Per-Paper Annotations ### Vaswani et al. (2017) **Research question**: <1 sentence from Phase 3 metadata> **Methodology**: <1-2 sentences> **Key findings**: - - - **Limitations**: <1-2 sentences> ### <...> ## References Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 <... more entries, one per paper ...> ``` ## Quality checks before finalizing Before saving the report, verify: - [ ] Every paper in the surveyed set appears **both** in "Per-Paper Annotations" **and** in "References". - [ ] Every in-text citation matches a reference entry (no dangling citations). - [ ] Authors are formatted `LastName, FirstInitial.` — not `FirstName LastName`. - [ ] Years are in parentheses inline, and at the start of reference entries. - [ ] Titles are in sentence case in references (only first word + proper nouns capitalized). - [ ] arXiv URLs use the `abs_url` form (`https://arxiv.org/abs/...`), not `pdf_url`. - [ ] References are alphabetized by first author's last name.