What Is Running Head?

The definition, precisely

A running head is a header, not body text: the shortened title of the paper printed at the top of each page with the page number, appearing on every page including the title page in professional format. APA 7 defines it tightly — an abbreviated version of the title in all capital letters, no longer than 50 characters counting letters, numbers and spaces — set flush left with the page number flush right in the same line. MLA 9 has no running head; its header is just the surname and page number.

The 50-character rule forces abbreviation. A paper titled The Effects of Sleep Restriction on Working Memory in College Athletes becomes SLEEP RESTRICTION AND WORKING MEMORY — every word pulled from the title, nothing invented, all caps, 37 characters. If the full title is already 50 characters or fewer, it runs unchanged. The purpose is practical: journal editors anonymize manuscripts for review, and printed pages that get shuffled can be reassembled by title alone. It also spares reviewers a page of guessing when emailed PDFs lose their filenames in transit.

APA 7 drew a line students still miss: the running head belongs to professional papers only. The student version — what nearly every course assignment is — needs a page number alone, top right on every page. In Word, the header tool does the work once for the whole document; Insert, then Header and Footer in Google Docs behaves the same way. Set it once, never retype it per page, and never paste a professional-format running head into a paper that does not need one.

The four mistakes graders see most

Every one of these shows up in a stack of sixty papers — usually more than once. Each pairs the error with the fix, so the table doubles as a pre-submission check.

A worked example

A graduate manuscript carries the title Attachment Style and First-Year Roommate Conflict: A Longitudinal Study — 74 characters, too long. The running head becomes ATTACHMENT STYLE AND ROOMMATE CONFLICT, 36 characters, all caps, flush left, with the page number flush right on every page including the title page. The same student's undergraduate essay in the same course needs none of it: page number top right, surname beside it if MLA, and the header bar left otherwise empty. Two papers, one header habit: set the tool once and let it repeat.

Pattern-match your own draft against this example rather than against the definition: concrete cases transfer better than abstract rules, and the example shows what the rule looks like when it is done right.

How running head differs from its neighbors

A running head is not the MLA header, which holds only the student's surname and the page number and exists to keep printed pages attached to their author. It is not the title page, which carries the full title once with names and affiliations. And it is not a section heading inside the paper. The running head is page furniture: it identifies the document, never argues for it, and the fastest check is whether the text sits in the header bar rather than the body.

Boundary confusion is where most grading deductions live: the term is understood roughly but applied against the wrong neighbor. Pin the boundary above and the term stops being fuzzy in practice, which is what the rubric is actually testing.