This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/). When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at bottom.
Formatting in Sociology (ASA Style)
Summary: This handout covers American Sociological Association (ASA) style and includes information about manuscript formatting, in-text citations, and formatting the references page. The bibliographical format described here is taken from the American Sociological Review.
Manuscript Formatting
Title Page
Include a separate title page with authors' names, institutions, and a complete word count of the document. A title footnote should include addresses, grants/funding, and additional credits and acknowledgements (for papers for sociology classes, this is often not needed).
Text Formatting
All text within the document should be in a 12 point font and double spaced (including footnotes).
Margins
Margins should be at least 1 1/4 inches on all sides.
Abstracts
If an abstract is needed, it should be on a separate page with the title of the document. The abstract should be 150-200 words.
First Page
The first page of the text should start with the title and be on a new page of text (after the title page and abstract).
Footnotes and Endnotes
Use footnotes to cite materials of limited availability, expand upon the text, or to add information presented in a table. Endnotes are used more frequently than footnotes, but both should be used sparingly.
In the text, footnotes should be numbered consecutively throughout the essay with superscript Arabic numerals. At the end of the paper in a separate section following the references, type the footnotes in numerical order, double-spaced, as a separate section.
Page Numbering
Pages should be numbered consecutively (1, 2, 3...) starting with the title page and including the references page(s).
Acronym usage
The first time you use an acronym, you should give the full name with the acronym in parenthesis. Afterwards, you can use only the acronym. Example:
Later in the text: