Style Guide AP Style: Frequently Used & Misused
AP Style does not use italics. Scientific journal names or magazines should be in title case and regular text, without quotation marks.
- Lowercase magazine unless it is part of the publication's formal title: Harper's Magazine, Newsweek magazine, Time magazine. Check the masthead if in doubt.
EXAMPLE: The paper was published in the journal Nature Digital Medicine.
AP Style does not use title case for headlines. Headlines should be in sentence case.
- Capitalize only the first word and proper nouns in headlines that use AP style. EXCEPTION: The first word after a colon is always uppercase in headlines.
EXAMPLE: Training genetic counselors to advance precision medicine
EXAMPLE: Planetscape: Fusing art, science and technology
AP Style uses title case for composition titles, which includes scientific papers.
- Apply these guidelines to the titles of books, movies, plays, poems, albums, songs, operas, radio and television programs, lectures, speeches and works of art:
- Capitalize all words in a title except articles (a, an, the); prepositions of three or fewer letters (for, of, on, up, etc.); and conjunctions of three or fewer letters (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet, etc.) unless any of those start or end the title.
- Capitalize prepositions of four or more letters (above, after, down, inside, over, with, etc.) and conjunctions of four or more letters (because, while, since, though, etc.)
- Capitalize both parts of a phrasal verb: “What To Look For in a Mate”; “Turn Off the Lights in Silence.” But: “A Life of Eating Chocolate for Stamina”; “Living With Both Feet off the Ground.” (Note the different uses of for and off, and thus the different capitalization, in those examples.)
- Capitalize to infinitives: “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.”
- Put quotation marks around the names of all such works except the Bible, the Quran and other holy books, and books that are primarily catalogs of reference material. In addition to catalogs, this category includes almanacs, directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, handbooks and similar publications.
AP Style advises against the use of acronyms and never places them in parentheses after the name/phrase.
- In general, avoid alphabet soup. Do not use abbreviations or acronyms that the reader would not quickly recognize. AVOID AWKWARD CONSTRUCTIONS: Do not follow the full name of an organization or company with an abbreviation or acronym in parentheses or set off by dashes. If an abbreviation or acronym would not be clear on second reference without this arrangement, do not use it.
Department names: Unlike AP, UAHS style is to capitalize departments and unit names unless used in a generic sense. For instance, we capitalize Immunobiology when talking about the specific department within basic science departments in the College of Medicine – Tucson, but lowercase the word in this instance “He studied immunology at the College of Medicine – Tucson.”
Degree names: Capitalize when referring to specific degrees. “The college conferred 56 Bachelor of Science degrees on Saturday.” Use an apostrophe in bachelor’s degree, a master’s, etc., but there is no possessive in Bachelor of Arts or Master of Science.