Discussion 4 Apa format
4 Discussions
Discussion 1: You’re the Editor
The APA Publication Manual is an essential reference guide for all students and practitioners in the social and behavioral sciences. The purpose of this Discussion is to assist you in becoming familiar with and applying key parts of the manual. For this Discussion, you will play the role of an editor who must provide feedback to the writer, identifying and correcting flaws in the writer’s use of citations, quotes, and references. How would you make the writer’s work reflect the language of the profession?
To prepare for this Discussion:
View the video APA Citations Part I: The Methods to the Madness, and read the Study Notes from the Learning Resources.
Become familiar with the APA Publication Manual; review Chapter 6, “Crediting Sources,” and Chapter 7, “Reference Examples,” and note their contents and the variety of topics covered.
Review the “
Assignment Sheet
: Social Change” document (located in this week’s Learning Resources area) for an excerpt that includes quotes, paraphrased information, and reference information without format.
With these thoughts in mind:
Complete the following steps by Day 3:
Step 1: Select one paragraph from the Social Change excerpt to edit. This document is found in the Learning Resources.
Step 2: Referring to Chapter 6 of the APA Publication Manual, revise the paragraph in correct APA format, rewriting the citations, quotations, and references as necessary. Use the references listed for your paragraph number as your citation sources.
Step 3: For this Discussion, the references for each paragraph are listed in the Social Change excerpt. These references are not in correct APA format. Using the information from Chapter 7 of the APA Publication Manual, put the references for your paragraph in correct APA format.
Step 4: Post your edited paragraph and references to the Discussion 1 board.
Readings
Chapter 6, “Crediting Sources” (pp. 169–192)
Chapter 7, “Reference Examples” (pp. 193–224)
These chapters describe how to credit sources in APA style
Document: Study Notes: Ten Common APA Points (PDF)
Study Notes
Ten Common APA Points
From the Walden Writing Center (http://writingcenter.waldenu.edu/17.htm)
Use a 12-point serif font for all text, including what appears on your cover page and reference list. Walden prefers Times New Roman. Minimum 8-point type can be used in tables and figures.
2. Spacing
Double space all text, including the reference list and block quotes. Per APA, use two spaces after a sentence; however, Walden will accept the use of one space after a period.
3. Margins, Page Numbers, and Running Head
All margins should be set to 1” on each side of the paper. Page numbers go in the upper right corner. The running head goes in the upper left corner and is in all capital letters. The words “Running head:” appear only on the cover page.
4. Boldface and Underlines
Do not use underlines. APA does not allow boldface except in tables and figures (in rare instances where you would want to highlight specific data) and for Level 1, 2, 3, and 4 headings.
5. Punctuation
APA requires the use of the serial (or Oxford) comma in lists of three or more items
(e.g., Groucho, Harpo, and Zeppo).
Most prefixes are not hyphenated: semistructured, nondenominational, multimedia, antisocial, posttest, pretest, and so forth.
6. Capitalization
Do not capitalize job titles unless immediately preceding a person’s name: the superintendent, but Superintendent Williams; the vice president of the school board,but Vice President Agnew. Additionally, do not capitalize the names of theories, models, conditions, or diseases.
7. Lists (Seriation)
Seriation refers to how to list information. Within a paragraph, list items that must appear in a certain order using (a), (b), and (c).
If you do not need to imply a particular order, then remove the letters and/or use bullet points. Use vertical lists when expressing information that must appear in a certain order (e.g., steps in a procedure or itemized conclusions).
8. Numbers and Percentages
Numbers 10 and higher appear as numerals; nine and lower are written out. There are exceptions: precise elements of time, age, distance, ratios, and percentages always appear as numerals unless at the start of a sentence.
9. Latin Abbreviations
Do not use Latin abbreviations (like e.g., i.e., and etc.) within the text of the sentence; APA only allows these types of abbreviations within parentheses. In the text of the sentence, write out the abbreviation’s English translation.
10. Use Respectful, Bias-Free Language
The APA manual outlines important information concerning avoiding bias with respect to gender, race, disabilities, and so forth. When discussing different racial groups, make sure that your terms are parallel. When possible, avoid the generic
pronouns he and she, or he/she by using they.
Document:
Assignment Sheet: Social Change
(Word Document)
Assignment Sheet
Week 4
Social Change
- 1. Several key individuals and ideas that have shaped the philosophy of social change. The first of these is Mahatma Gandhi. According to Kapadia, Gandhi believed that ideas and ideals had no value if they were not translated into action. Gandhi talked frequently about social change and service to others: The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. Implementing positive social change can be a difficult process. Gandhi was asked why people should not just achieve their goals by any means necessary. He believed that the means are connected to the end. Gandhi wrote: every problem lends itself to solution if we are determined to make the law of truth and nonviolence the law of life. According to Pal, Gandhi influenced many important social change movements and leaders. Some leaders who have acknowledged his influence are: Dr. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi and Rigoberta Menchu.
- 2. Another world leader who spent most of his life fighting for social change was Nelson Mandela. As described in information related to a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Frontline special on Mandela, not everyone is able to see the results of their hard-fought efforts in their lifetimes. Sometimes, they can only lay the groundwork for the next generation. Mandela was able to lead and experience this transformation in South Africa which brought an end to apartheid and now has a constitution that guarantees the rights of all people. According to Mendoza Mandela believed in the importance of changing yourself first and said, one of the most difficult things is not to change society — but to change yourself.
- 3. In our country, Dr. King embraced the tenets of non-violence in his leadership within the civil rights movement and enduring philosophy for bringing about social change. He wrote about his those who inspired his philosophy of nonviolent social change and Gandhi was a significant influence. According to Pal, King took a month-long trip to India in 1959 in order to visit the country of his inspiration. The King Center is dedicated to preserving his legacy and provide ongoing support for social change. Based on Dr. King’s teachings, The King Center published, Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change. These six steps are: information gathering, education, personal commitment, negotiation, direct action, and reconciliation.
- 4. Social change is a founding value and educational goal at Walden University as expressed in the Mission and Vision statements, and incorporated in every course curriculum. The Walden Vision statement reads as follows: Walden University envisions a distinctively different 21st-century learning community where knowledge is judged worthy to the degree that it can be applied by its graduates to the immediate solutions of critical societal challenges, thereby advancing the greater global good. While bringing about social change on either a micro or macro level can be daunting, Mandela was quoted as saying: It always seems impossible until it’s done. The teachings of Gandhi, Mandela, King and many others continue to influence new generations of scholars and social change practitioners.
References for Paragraph 1
Author: A. Pal Date: Jan 24, 2008. Title of article: 60 years after death, Gandhi is Making world a better Place. Published in: The Progressive. Website:http://www.progressive.org/mag_wxap012408
Mahatma Gandhi. 1961. Book title: Non-violent Resistance. City: New York Publisher: Schocken Books.
S. Kapadia, (n.d.). Article title: A Tribute to Mahatma Gandhi: His Views on Women and Social Change. Website: https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/kapadia.htm
Goodreads. No date. Mahatma Gandhi quotes. Website: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11416-the-best-way-to-find-yourself-is-to-lose-yourself
References for Paragraph 2
Frontline. Date: May 25, 1999). Title: The Long walk of Nelson Mandela: Viewers’ and Teachers’ Guide. Website: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mandela/teach/
Author: Dorris Mendoza Date: December 16, 2013. Article Title: 9 simple ways to keep Nelson Mandela’s Legacy alive. Website: http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/16/living/keeping-mandelas-legacy-alive/
References for Paragraph 3
Author: A. Pal Date: Jan 24, 2008. Title of article: 60 years after death, Gandhi is Making world a better Place. Published in: The Progressive. Website:http://www.progressive.org/mag_wxap012408
The King Center. No date. Title: Six steps of nonviolent Social Change. website: http://www.thekingcenter.org/king-philosophy
References for Paragraph 4
Goodreads. No date. Nelson Mandela Quotes. Website:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/36606-it-always-seems-impossible-until-it-s-done
This document will be used for your Discussion assignments this week.
Document:APA Citations Part 1: Methods to the Madness Program Transcript
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: You have logged into “APA Citations Part 1.” I’m joined tonight by my fellow tutors, Anne and Rachel. They’re going to be answering questions for you tonight. So thank you to both of them in advance. And our basic goal for tonight is to clear up some of the confusing parts of APA references from the reference list and citations in your paper.
OK, so just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. As I said, we have two facilitators, Anne and Rachel, who are going to be answering questions for you tonight. And if you have questions throughout the presentation, you can type them in the questions box that you’ll see in your go-to webinar panel. And you will receive an answer typed in that box as well.
I will stop a couple of different times throughout the presentation and ask the facilitators to tell me some questions that have been coming up a lot. So we’ll answer some of the more common questions out loud in the presentation. But if you do have a burning question that you need to ask right away, or if you are having trouble or having technical difficulties, feel free to type in that question box.
Anne is posting some links now. One is to access the captioning for this recording. So you can find that there in the chat box. You’ll also see the link where you can download the slides from this presentation so that you can have those as a reference for later. And we are recording the session tonight. The recording will be available on our website after, of course, of the presentation is finished. And you will be able to go back and download that and access this presentation later. Or if you want to refer to a friend who wasn’t able to make it tonight, they’re welcome to view that as well.
I do also want to mention that we have a hand out, a resource that goes with this presentation. That’s also available on our website. So I encourage all of you to access that as well. It’s a handy reference, a flow chart that will help you access some of our referenced resources and make use of some of the things that we learn tonight.
OK, so here’s what we’re going to talk about this evening. We’re going to start by just asking this question that you’ve probably all asked yourself before, but maybe not out loud. Why do we use APA? What is the point of APA? We’re going to start by talking about that. Then we’re going to look at the different parts of a reference list entry in APA.
After that, we’re going to take a look at citations both the in-text citations and parenthetical citations– so the way that you give credit to sources in your paper.
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And then we’re going to do some practicing, taking information out of references and turning it into citations.
And then, as I said, we will have time at the end for some questions. And I’m going to stop in the middle of the presentation for questions as well just in case there’s anything that people maybe would forget about before the end of the presentation.
So here’s this question– what’s the point of APA? And, again, I have a feeling that many of you have asked yourselves this question, but maybe you haven’t felt comfortable asking your instructor or writing center staff. It’s a valid question. Why are we using all these rules about formatting, about citations, about references? Why does it matter? And what’s it useful for?
We all like to know why rules exist and what the point of those rules is. So the very first reason that we use as a formatting style for scholarly work and at Walden is because it helps your readers focus on your ideas and not formatting errors. So it’s basically a way to get rid of all of that noise that might distract your reader from the most important thing that you want to communicate to them, which is your ideas.
You don’t want them to be distracted because they’re confused. They can’t figure out why you formatted something a certain way. Or they don’t understand where to find certain information. Instead, you just want to make sure that there is a blanket style, that it’s uniform, so that everybody understands that’s how we do it. We don’t have to think about it anymore. And now we can just focus on the ideas.
The second reason is that APA, as a citation style, is specifically designed to communicate information about your field, about the social sciences, to an audience of scholars in your same field. So there are many different citation styles. Walden has chosen APA, because the rules are designed specifically, again, for the social sciences and disciplines related to the social sciences. So it’s actually the most appropriate style to use for the disciplines that Walden students are researching.
So some of you might have used other styles in other degree programs, maybe in undergrad, maybe if you’re a doctoral student, maybe in your master’s degree. You may have used a different style from APA. And this can get really confusing, because we often see in journals references formatted in different ways. They’re not always all in APA.
So I wanted to show you a couple of other citation styles as well to contrast with APA. So this first reference, you’ll see here, is in APA format– proper APA format. But the second one is in what’s called MLA format. A lot of us in the writing center have degrees in English. This is the style that we used in our English degrees that a lot of different humanities disciplines use.
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So you’ll see it looks different from the APA citation or the APA reference. It has some different formatting rules. And then this bottom one is in what’s called Chicago style. This is another formatting publication style. And it’s used often in journalism– sometimes in history.
So again, you’ll see that it doesn’t look the same. It doesn’t have the same formatting rules. There are some different punctuation, different capitalization, and italics that you don’t see in APA. So don’t assume if you see a formatted reference that it’s formatted in APA style.
All right, so we’re going to start and just go systematically through the different portions of journal article reference in APA. And I will explain the different parts as we go through. And then we’ll do an exercise at the end to practice taking some information from the journal and putting it into a reference in APA format.
So you’ll see the very first thing that appears in a reference in APA is the author’s name. This is a made-up reference. So don’t go looking for it in the Walden library. But here’s the author’s name. Kallman is the surname and B, we have the first initial of the author’s first name as well. And you’ll notice that the surname and the first initial are separated by a comma.
So in your reference list, your references are going to be alphabetized by author last name. And this is primarily why the author’s last name comes first, because it’s the easiest way to organize references in a reference list. So you are going to start with A. You’re going to go through Z. And you may not have references that cover every letter in the alphabet. But you do want to alphabetize your references in your reference list.
Now, you’ll notice that in this slide, the last name of the author is hanging off the left-hand edge of the reference a little bit. And this is called a hanging indent. In Microsoft Word, when you format your references, the hanging indent is actually flush with the left-hand margin. So that author name is going to be flush with the left-hand margin of your page. Every other line of the reference is going to be indented half an inch.
Now, the reason for this is basically just to save space. So instead of having to put a whole bunch of space between each reference so that your reader knows where one reference and then the next one begins, we see that the next reference is starting because the next author’s name is hanging off the edge there a little bit. So that’s the purpose of the hanging indent.
All right, so why do we only put the author’s last name and first initial in APA formatted references when some of those other citation styles might use just the last name or the whole name when there are so many different ways to do it. Why does AP do it this way?
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Well, the first reason is because social scientists are primarily concerned with examining trends in data rather than following the work of an individual author. Now, this isn’t to say that you might not find somebody who’s doing research that you find really fascinating or really relevant to your own work. And you might want to follow their research over time. You definitely may want to do that.
But there’s a little bit of a difference between the way the author’s personal identity is connected to their work in the social sciences versus, say, a novelist, whose personal identity is very much attached to their work. And you always say the name of the novel and an author’s name together.
So part of the reason why we only list the author’s last name is because it’s primarily a tool to alphabetize. And we’re not linking the work to the author’s personal identity. Again, a social science audience really doesn’t need to know the author’s first name because again, the data that they’re producing is the primary thing that a social science audience is interested in.
Finally, it can help avoid bias. So you don’t necessarily know the gender of the author because you don’t have the full first name. You only have a initial. It helps you to view the source in a more objective way.
So our next component of an APA reference is going to be the publication year. And you’ll see it’s bolded here in this sample reference. So for almost all publications, you’re only going to include the publication year. However, for periodicals such as magazines and newspapers, you do also include the month, that’s for magazines, inside these parentheses. And for newspapers, you’ll include the day or the date.
And this is because you want to make sure that you are including information that tells the reader how the source is categorized, because a periodical is often published more often, a magazine is published monthly, and it’s identified by the name of the month rather than a volume number, that’s why you put that there. And same with a newspaper.
A newspaper is usually a daily publication. So you want to include the day and the date in there as well. That’s to help the reader retrieve the original source if they want it.
Now, here’s a little trick that you might not know about. If you can’t find the year for a source, some sources may not have a publication year linked to them. This most often happens with websites. And if you can’t find the year, you can simply put the letters n.d., as you see here, which stands for No Date inside those parentheses.
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So you want them to be lowercase. You want them to be punctuated by two periods after the two letters. And that’s going to tell the reader there is no date for this reference. Don’t go looking for it.
So why is the publication year so important? Why does it take such a place of prominence in the reference? The first reason is because recent studies are so important in the disciplines that we’re working in here at Walden. As you all know in your courses, recent studies are highly emphasized as an important part of your research, making sure that the research that you’re basing your own arguments upon is not outdated in any way.
So a study published in 1940 is not equal to a study published in 2011. Now, this isn’t to say that you won’t necessarily use studies that were published earlier. There are, of course, many times when you might want to use a seminal work of somebody who had a groundbreaking theory that other people then built upon later on.
But, again, it’s important to know if that study is a seminal study that was conducted many years ago or if it’s something that’s more recent. So that’s the first reason.
The year of the study can help the reader evaluate its relevance to their own research. So if somebody is reading your paper, they can see that the year is right there. And that can help them decide if this study that you’re referencing is also relevant to their own research based on how current it is.
And, again, in the social sciences, the year of the study was published is almost more important than the author’s personal identity. It’s definitely equally important to the author’s personal identity. So it takes that prominent place in the reference.
OK, so after the author’s name and the publication year, we have the rest of the reference. Now, the reason I grouped these all together is because there is less explanation for why these components are formatted the way that they are, although there are reasons behind certain parts of them. For instance, you’ll see the next component there is the title of the article, the book, or the web page. In this case, it’s an article. And the title is “Chocolate as a critical component of effective paper writing.”
Now, you’ll see that the article title here is in sentence case. And that means that only the first letter of the first word. And then you don’t see it here. But if you had a colon in this title, the first word after the colon would have the first letter capitalized. And any proper nouns are still capitalized. So names of states or names of people all are still capitalized.
But everything else is lowercase. And this is because social science article titles are written to be purely informative. They’re written to help the reader understand
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exactly what the content and focus of that particular article is. And in sentence case, it’s easier for the eye to scan for that information. Our eye is used to scanning a sentence for information in a paragraph. So sentence case makes it easy to scan the article title in the reference.
Then we have the journal title which you’ll see is in title case. So again, this makes sense the journal title is in title case. Title case means all the important words are capitalized. Only the small words like “of” and “and” don’t get capitalized in title case.
Then we have the volume, issue, and page numbers. And this is the part where I just don’t have a good explanation for why these are formatted the way that they are. Certainly, they’re formatted to help the eye scan them easily to differentiate between the different portions. You’ll notice that the volume number, which is that 5 there, is a italicized. Whereas the issue number is not italicized and is parentheses. So we can easily tell which is which.
And then after that, the page range, 12 through 16, is separate from that with a comma and has the dash to show that it’s a range. But other than that, I don’t have any real magical explanations for why APA has chosen to format this information in this way. This is a part that is probably best just to memorize and not worry too much about.
The last component is either a DOI or a URL. Now, I get a lot of questions, and we all do in the writing center, about DOIs. And they can be confusing at first. But they’re actually pretty simple. DOI is an acronym. It stands for Digital Object Identifier. And it’s basically just a number that has been assigned to an online article that’s permanent.
It’s not going to change. It’s very stable. And this is to ensure that even in a few years time if somebody accesses your work, they can find this article using this DOI, because it’s not going to change. Now, not every online article has been assigned a DOI. So if you can’t find the DOI for a particular source, then you want to include the URL for the journal home page.
Now, this is for journal articles only– digital journal articles. And this is a role that is new for the sixth edition of the APA manual. So if you were working in the fifth edition, you weren’t using this rule. This is a change. But Walden is using the sixth edition now. So this is the way that Walden is doing it now. You’re going to have to go to Google and type in the name of the journal. And just find the home page for that journal.
So here, our journal is a made-up journal. But it’s the Journal of Writing and Dessert. I wish this journal wasn’t made up. I think it sounds brilliant. But it is something that you do need to search for on the internet. And once you find that
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homepage, that’s what you have fluid at the end of your reference. And we’ll talk about that a little bit more later as well.
OK, so by now, I hope that you’re having a little bit of an aha moment APA. I hope you’re realizing that APA formatting rules aren’t as random as they seem to be at first that they maybe are a little bit more deliberate that they have a little bit more purpose behind them.
And then I hope also that you’re realizing that following these rules correctly can help you communicate your specific content to fellow scholars in your field. So APA really is a tool that you can use to help you format your references in a way that is going to communicate your information effectively and efficiently to your audience rather than just being a bunch of boring rules that somebody created to give you a headache.
All right, so we’re going to do a little practice test now about moving data from its raw state into an APA reference. This can be the hardest part sometimes of formatting a reference. You might say, well, I know exactly what an APA reference is supposed to look like. But how do I find that information to plug into the different sections? Right? Where do I find the DOI? Where do I find the journal title? Where do I find volume number?
So we’re going to look at this sample. This is just taken in from the JSTOR database, which is a database that Walden has access to. Now, not every database is going to look the same. So if you’re using JSTOR, you’ll see something that looks very similar to this. But you might be using EBSCO, or Eric, or another database. There are a lot of databases that you have access to through Walden. And they vary by discipline. So keep in mind that there will be citation information on your database. But it may not look exactly like it does in this slide in a different database.
OK? So what is that first element of an APA reference? It’s the author last name, right? So we want to look for those author’s names first. And here they are– Michelle Cox, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper, and Katherine E. Tirabassi are the authors of this article. Now, you’ll see if this isn’t the same as APA format. Their first names are in there. And their last name not listed before their first initial. So this is, again, that raw data that you’re going to have to pull out of whatever source you’re looking at. And then you have to manipulate it into APA format. OK?
So our next element of an APA reference is our publication year. And you’ll see it’s down here tucked in with the volume number. And there’s a month in there that we know isn’t supposed to be there in APA. So, again, you’re pulling this out of something that’s not an APA. You’re finding these different components that you know the APA reference needs. And you’re pulling them into that proper format.
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Next, we need the title of the article, because that’s the next element in an APA reference. So you’ll see it’s here. It’s also over here. And you’ll notice that it is in title case, not sentence case, as it should be in an APA reference. So you’re going to keep all the words, all the letters, all the punctuation. But you’re going to remove those capital letters from the beginnings of the words that shouldn’t have capital letters in sentence case, again, manipulating the raw data into APA.
Then you need the journal information. So that’s over here. Again, you see the journal part is correct in APA. It’s italicized. It’s in title case. But then we’ve got all this other extra weird stuff. We have VOL for volume and O for the issue number. We’ve got, again, that May– month in there. We know we don’t need that. And then we have some two Ps for page numbers. And that isn’t something that belongs in an APA reference either. So don’t be swayed by that. Just because it’s on our database homepage doesn’t mean that it’s proper APA format. You get to do that yourself.
And finally, I wanted to point out I oftentimes on journal websites or database websites, you will see a URL like this. And it even says stable URL here. Now, this is the URL to the database location for the article. And the reason that APA doesn’t have you include that your URL is just because they want to make this access as universal as possible. And they know that not everybody has the same access to the same databases.
So you at Walden have access to a certain number of databases through the Walden library. But other universities have different database descriptions. Or somebody might be looking at your reference list who isn’t currently affiliated with the university and might not have access, So the idea behind using the journal home page is to try and make this information as universally accessible as possible.
OK, so how would we take the information that we just looked at on this page and format it into an APA reference for this source? In a minute, I’m going to switch slides. And we’re going to do a poll. So I’m going to have you vote. So I just want you to take another quick look at this slide before I move on to the next one.
So I want you to take a look at these three references and decide which one is the correct way to format an APA reference for the source that we just looked at on the previous slide. Based on the information that we talked about at the beginning of the presentation, which one looks like it is in the appropriate format for APA. And after you look at this, memorize which letter, A, B, or C is the one that you think is correct that you want to vote for, because this slide is going to go away when I ask Anne to pull up our poll, which I’m going to do in just a minute.
So take a look, and make your choice, and keep it in your head. And then I’ll have Anne call up the poll. And we will have you vote. OK, I’ll give you a couple
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more seconds to make your choice. OK, Anne I think that we are ready for that poll.
Looks like people are voting. This is great. Keep casting your votes. OK, I’ll give you just a few more seconds to vote. All right, looks like we’ve slowed down a little bit here. So let’s close it out. And we’ll take a look at our results.
All right, excellent. Oops, where did my thing go? 81% chose B, which is the correct answer. Here is my slide. Good job, everyone. That’s great. And for those of you. It looks like a few more people chose C than A. And C was much more correct than A. So don’t despair if you chose C. There were a few issues there that were incorrect. But that was closer to correct than A was. So nice work everybody.
So let’s talk a little bit about why this one is correct. The first reason is we’ve got author– first initials here. So you may have noticed in the previous slide with the three examples, some of the examples had full author first names. And that’s not what we want in APA. In APA, we just want author last name– author first initial, only. OK?
Now, we didn’t talk very much about this. But in your reference list in APA format when you’re listing authors, you always want to use this little symbol– twisty symbol called the ampersand, which means “and.” But you don’t ever spell out the word and in a list of authors.
Now, if “and” appears in journal title or in your article title, feel free to spell it out. You should spell it out. And don’t substitute the ampersand if that’s not how it appears in the journal article. But in your list of authors, always use the ampersand and not spelling– don’t spell out the word “and.”
And you’ll notice too– here we have a list of three author names. And after the second author name, before the ampersand, there’s a comma there. And that comes after the period that abbreviates the author’s first initial or abbreviates the author’s first name to the first initial. So it looks like a lot of punctuation all smashed together there.
That is correct. You want to make sure that you’re first abbreviating the name with the period. Then you are separating the second author’s name from the third author’s name with a comma. And then you’re adding the ampersand in to say, “and” so we know that we’re at the final author name. OK?
This was another discrepancy between the different options that you could vote for. You want to make sure that there’s no extra letters when you are listing volume, issue, and page numbers. You don’t want VOL. As an abbreviation for volume. You don’t want NO period as an abbreviation for number. You don’t want any Ps in there trying to show page numbers. It’s just the numerals, and those
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parentheses, and the punctuation that shows volume issue and number in the APA format.
And then finally, again, just to stress, we don’t want the URL of the database in our reference. Instead, use the home page of the journal, which you can find by typing it into Google.
All right, I am going to pause. Just for a moment and ask if there are any big questions that have been coming up over the first part of the presentation. Anne or Rachel if you want to mute and let me know if there is anything burning that people are wanting to know about that we can answer.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Hi, Brittany. I have had a lot of great questions come in. And there’s one, well, there’s several that would be good to talk about. One in particular, since we’re on this slide 14, is that we’ve had a couple of people point out that the authors listed here are alphabetized. So they’re wondering are they supposed to be alphabetized? Or how does that work when you have multiple authors in a reference entry?
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: That is an excellent question. The answer is that the authors should appear in the same order that they appear in their original reference. So here, they happen to be alphabetized. And I believe that isn’t uncommon for authors to be alphabetized in a study that has multiple authors. I think that tends to be a way that people decide how to fairly distribute the authors in a list when they’ve all done equal work.
But that’s not necessarily always the case. And if a different author appears first in the original source, that author should appear first in your reference as well. OK?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Thanks, Brittany. BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Yeah, you bet.
FEMALE SPEAKER: A couple of other questions we have here about some capitalization and punctuation issues. The first one is wondering about punctuation with the DOI and the colon. When are there spaces? Are there no spaces? And can DOI ever be capitalized?
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Great question. Yeah, this gets confusing. So if you see us reference DOI or in your APA manual, if you see in a paragraph somebody talking about DOI, you’ll often see that it’s all capitalized, because it is an acronym. However, for the same reason that we use sentence case for the article title in an APA reference, you want to have all three of those letters DOI lowercase only in your reference. That’s just, again, to help the eye scan. So it’s
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confusing. If you were saying, I used a DOI in my reference, and you wrote that sentence out, DOI would be upper case, because it’s an acronym.
But in your reference, it should all be lower case, again, to help the eye scan. Now, in terms of punctuation, you do always have a colon after those three lowercase letters, doi:. And then this feels very weird to people because it’s not how you would do it in a sentence if you were using a colon. But according to APA, there should not be a space between the colon and the start of the DOI– the start of the actual number. So it’s just all smashed together– the letters doi:, and then the actual DOI number– all together, no spaces.
Oh, and let me say one more thing too. You’ll see in some other references that we’re going to look at later on sometimes a reference will end with a period. But with the DOI or URL, you don’t want to put a period at the end of the reference because that would be construed as being part of that web address or part of that DOI. And you don’t want to confuse the reader and give them the wrong path to that original article.
So when there’s a DOI or a URL at the end of the reference, don’t put a period then after that.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Thanks, Brittany. Talking about colons, we also had a couple questions pointing to, again, the slide 14 about the capitalized Community that comes after the colon here. Could you speak to that briefly?
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Absolutely. Yeah, so even though we’re in sentence case here, meaning most of the words are lowercase. After a colon, even in sentence case, you capitalize the very first word. And so that can be a little bit confusing at first because you’re so used to trying to make these words that appear in uppercase in their original source into lowercase words. But just keep in mind– think about what happens after the colon has a new sentence starting over. So that means that you do capitalized just that first word right after the colon in the title.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Another great segue here, Brittany. You’ve been talking about title case and sentence. Could you explain what that means again?
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Yes. So the easiest way to remember what these terms mean is to think about the actual term itself and where the term comes from. So a sentence case is linked to the way that we use case, meaning upper or lower case, letters in a sentence. So in a normal sentence that you would write in your normal paragraph in your paper, you wouldn’t capitalize all the words, right? You would only capitalize the first word– the first word after a colon usually and proper nouns like names of people, names of places, and so on.
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And so those are the same rules that apply when you use sentence case in your article title in your reference. Now, title case is the less common one in a paragraph. But it’s very common in titles. So in the title of your paper– in the title of a journal or a book– you’ll often see that most of the words are capitalized– just not the little words like the connecting words like “and” and “the.” Those words often aren’t capitalized or should not be capitalized in title case.
So think about what name of the different cases actually means. And that can help you remember what sentence case and title case mean. Does that help?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Yeah , thanks, Brittany. We’ve got a lot of other really great questions here. But I know we have more to cover. So everybody– Rachel and I will be continuing to answer your questions in the background while we move ahead with the presentation. And we should have time at the end to answer additional questions to have Brittany help us with those additional questions.
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Yep, absolutely, thank you so much. All right, thanks guys. Those are all really great questions. And again, we’ll keep answering them throughout the presentation. We’ll leave some time at the end as well.
OK, so we’re going to move on now from references to in-text citations. Now, these are the places inside your actual paper where you’re giving credit to an author, for their ideas. And we’re going to talk about what the purpose of in-text citations are and what components make up an in-text citation.
There it goes. So the first purpose of an in-text citation is to give information in the body of your paper that can help your reader locate that source in your reference list. So you can kind of think of an in-text citation as a little arrow that points your reader to the full information for that source in the reference list.
Now, if we listed all that information from the reference, every single time we quoted somebody or paraphrase somebody, our people would get really long. And it would be really hard to slog through all of that. So that’s part of the reason why there are fewer components to an in-text citation than there are to a reference.
The second thing that they do is they help you give proper credit to other sources. So they really do help you with your academic integrity. They help you not plagiarize. They make sure that you are giving credit to other people for ideas that you’re using in your paper. So any time you’re using ideas that are published by somebody else, you’re using an in-text citation to show that those ideas came from somebody else.
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They show that your topic is relevant. Again, they can help you link whatever ideas you’re talking about to a specific time period to say look, people are talking about this now because this study was published in 2012. This is really current.
And finally, you’ll be glad to hear, in-text citations are much, much simpler than reference formatting. They have fewer components, as I said, and the components stay the same across the source type for the most. So they’re easier to remember how to format.
So here’s another sample reference. And you’ll see there’s just a lot of information here that we’ve gone through before– all these different components- – all these different numbers, and letters, and italics, and not italics. But all that you have to pull out for your in-text citations are these little bits. So just the author last name, not even the first initial, just last name, the publication year, and the pages. And that’s it.
So to review, we have last names of author authors only, not first initials, the publication year and the page or paragraph number. Now, if you have a source that isn’t paginated that doesn’t have page numbers, usually this ends up being a website, you can count the paragraphs, and then you should give the paragraph number from which your direct quote came.
And a little side note– the rule in APA is that for direct quotations, you must include a page or paragraph number in your in-text citation. However, you’re also welcome to include a page or paragraph number for your paraphrase. It’s just not required.
So if you feel that would be helpful for your reader to be able to access the specific page or paragraph from which you’re paraphrasing, feel free to also include that information as well. It’s just not required.
So this is where it gets a little sticky. And I want to make sure to be clear about the way that we use the term in-text citation. Now, this is kind of a term with a double meaning the first meaning it just means as opposed to the reference list, an in-text citation is any citation that happens in the body of your paper. So anything that’s not your reference list but mentions author, date, and page numbers is called an in-text citation.
Now, it also has a more specific meaning, which means as opposed to a parenthetical citation. For the purpose of this slide, I’m calling it parenthetical versus in-sentence citations. And in-sentence and in-text can be interchangeable. So this will make more sense in a second.
So first, we have parenthetical citations. These are citations that happen at the end of a sentence in your paper and where all of the information is in the parenthesis. And here’s an example. So here’s my quote, “When students eat
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chocolate, their writing improves.” and then here, at the end, I have my paramedical citation.
And I have my three components that never change. I have my name, just last name, I have my publication year, and because it’s a direct quote, I must have my page number here as well. And I could also include that if it was a paraphrase if I wanted to.
So that is a parenthetical citation– parenthetical because it’s in parentheses. In- sentence or in-text citation are part of your sentence. That means the author’s name appears as the subject of your sentence or as some portion of your sentence. And the sentence wouldn’t be grammatically correct without it.
Like this– “Kallman found that when students ate chocolate, their writing improved.” if I took Kallman out, the sentence wouldn’t make sense. But I still have this publication year here because that has to be linked to the author’s name, always again, to show relevance and to make sure we know that the study is current.
So if you’re including an in-text citation, you always want to have the publication year directly follow the author’s name. And you’ll see that I don’t have a page number here because this is a paraphrase. But if I wanted to have a page number for the paraphrase, I could include that.
So we’re going to talk about just a couple more variations on references. So we’ve talked about an article with a DOI. But we’re going to do one more. Then we’re going to do a book. And we’re going to do an article. And we’re going to look at a couple of different components in each of the source types. And then we’re going to do some more polls that are going to help you pull information out of these references and format them into citations.
So I’m going to start by just highlighting a couple of things about DOIs here since we’re looking at an article with a DOI. Again, this is a fictional reference. So don’t go looking for this in the Walden library, even though I’m sure it would be a very fascinating article. So I can’t remember if I mentioned this before. A DOI is preferable to a URL. Again, because the DOI is stable, you’re sure that it’s going stay the same.
But, again, a lot of articles don’t have DOIs yet. So if you can’t find one, use the URL instead. And, again, that’s the URL to the journal home page. If you don’t have a DOI listed directly on the electronic version of the article, you can look it up at this website here. And I won’t pull that up right now because we’re running low on time.
But this is a really handy website. It’s got a bunch of different fields that you can fill in. So if you just know the article title and the author, you can fill those in. If
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you have more information, you can put that in there as well. And it will generate a search. And then it will either tell you what article’s DOI is. Or it will tell you that there isn’t one. And, again, if there isn’t one, then you just use the URL to the journal home page.
OK, so I want you to take a good look at this reference and think about how you would format a parenthetical citation as opposed to an in-sentence or in-text citation for a paraphrase of this source. So say you’re paraphrasing some information from this source. And then you wanted to cite that information in a parenthetical citation, how would you do that?
So I’m going to show you some options in the next slide. “Which of these is the correct way to format a parenthetical citation for a paraphrase from this source?” I’ll give you a couple seconds to take a look. And then, again, you want to keep your letter answer in your mind because this slide will go away when that poll comes up, OK?
All right, does everyone have your answer? OK, and I think we can go ahead and pull that poll up, the second one. OK, got some good voting going on here.
All right, it look like it’s trickling off a little bit so you can go ahead and close. Excellent. All right, so we’ve got 47% who chose choice B and 39% who chose choice D, and a few sprinklings in the other ones. But those were the primary ones that got the most votes. And this was a little bit of a trick question. So I apologize for that.
B and D are both correct. And as I said before, you don’t need to include page numbers for a paraphrase. That’s why I do have B as the correct answer here. But you are welcome to do that. So D would be appropriate as well. So again, we have all of our information for a parenthetical citation inside the parentheses, not outside as part of the sentence.
All of the components are separated by commas. So we’ve got our author component first, then a comma, and then the publication year. We don’t have any author first initials at all. So in any in-m text citation, you never want author first initial or first names– just last names. And finally, just like in the reference list, in you r parenthetical citation only, you’re going to use the ampersand again.
Now, this is not the same as in-text citations where you are actually going to spell out the word “and” if the list of authors appears as part of your sentence, as a grammatical part of your sentence. But inside parentheses, you always use the ampersand again. OK?
Here is a sample reference for a book. Now, you’ll notice this looks a little bit different than an article reference. It has less information. That’s because there is no journal with any volume number, issue number, page numbers to include
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information for. So we just have the author’s last name, and first initial, and the publication here. Those are the same.
And then you’ll notice that the book title is still in sentence case. But it’s italicized unlike a journal article would be. This is because this is the only title of anything that happens in this reference. There is nothing that’s bigger that this is included as a part of. It’s just all by itself. So it’s italicized. Book titles are always italicized. But, again, they are in sentence case.
We’ve got a publication city, Minneapolis. We’ve got a comma. We’ve got the state abbreviation– MN for Minnesota– then a colon, and then Pachyderm Press is a made up publisher name. So this is the only information that you need for a book reference. You don’t need any page numbers. You don’t need any chapter numbers. Even if you only cite off of one page of a book, if the book is by only one author, you can just include a reference like this without any more specific information.
All right, so we’re going to do another poll. I want you to take a look at this reference and decide how you would format an in-text citation for a paraphrase of this source– in-text citation or in-sentence citation. And here are your options. So which of these is appropriate for an in-text or in-sentence citation for this source. Pick your letter that you think is right. And I think we’ll have Anne open up the next poll.
OK, we’ve got some good votes trickling in here. All right, I’m going to have close it, Anne, just because we’re running low on time here. So sorry for those of you who didn’t get a chance to vote. But I am proud to say that we have primarily correct answers. Most people voted for B.
So if you voted for D, that was a properly formatted source. But it was a parenthetical citation instead of an in-text citation. So, again, an in-text citation has the author’s name as part of the sentence– “Babar reviewed how to wear a beret.” Again, the publication year always follows directly from the author name. And well, that’s a little redundant, isn’t it?
Again, the in-text citation means the author’s name as part of the sentence. So our next example is of a scholarly website. And I think I’m going to skip the poll on this one, because we’re going to have just a couple minutes for questions here at the end. And I want to make sure we have time for that. But I do want to highlight a couple of things about how to cite a scholarly website.
So oftentimes, a scholarly website will have an organization as an author such as this one. And that’s fine. An organization can author a source. So here, the author is the Centers for Disease Control. You’ll see that I put nd for No Date, because the source is made up to show that if this was a real source, there maybe would be no date available for this web resource.
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You also want to keep in mind that even if you’re citing multiple web pages from the same website, each web page should have its own reference entry. Unlike for journal articles, you want to use the exact URL to the web page. So you’re not going to just use the home page of that website. You want to lead the reader directly to the web page that you are citing. And web page titles are not italicized- – no, they are in sentence case, I’m sorry. But they’re not italicized. So they look a little bit different than the book titles do we’ll see here. So that’s what a scholarly website reference looks like.
So I’m going to skip through the next couple slides because I want to give us some time for questions. And we’ve talked about most of that stuff already. So let’s open it back up again. I know we just have a couple minutes left here. But Anne and Rachel– was there anything else that seemed like it was coming up a lot?
OK, oh great. And it looks like Anne might have some time to stay afterwards to answer more questions. And I have time as well. So if people want to stay on the line after eight o’clock and ask further questions, we’ll be happy to do that.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Hey, Brittany, we have a lot of questions about the DOI and where to find it. So we’ll be staying a few more minutes. you could show that cross reference resource.
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Absolutely. Yeah, I will. I am going to go back to that slide here here. It’s easier. Where is it? Here we go.
So this is what it looks like. It’s called Free DOI Lookup. And you’ll see there are all of these fields here that you can fill in. And you may or may not have this information. This search on article title can be easier if you just have a very little bit of information. So you can just put the surname and the article title there and press Search.
If you have more information like the journal title, the volume issue, or the page numbers, the publication year, you can use this more advanced form to try and find an article DOI. Now, if I had been thinking, I would have come up with an example to search for in here and show you I don’t have one off the top of my head. But honestly, this is a very user-friendly site. And it’s very possible that it might pop up and say, no results found, or no DOIs found. And if that’s the case, you can just assume that this article doesn’t have a DOI.
Again, not every electronic article has been assigned a DOI yet. So it’s very possible that whatever article you’re working with doesn’t have one. But it’s really important to check first, because again, that really is the most preferable retrieval information to include for your online journal articles because it’s so stable. And you can ensure that your reader can find the article based on that number a little
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bit more easily than they could if they had to go to the journal home page and click through and search for it there. OK? I hope that’s helpful.
FEMALE SPEAKER: It is. Thank you Brittany. We’ve also have had some students wondering about where they can find an example reference list. So maybe you could take us to the templates page and tell them about that.
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: I certainly can. Yeah, this is great, actually, because we can see how the spacing and the hanging indent works as well. So I’m going to take us to our writing center home page. It’s writingcenter.waldenu.edu. This is what it looks like. And you’ll see over here on the far right on this little tab, that’s called APA style. There’s information on everything that we talked about tonight. There’s information on in-text citations. There’s information on the reference list. There’s some other APA style issues.
And down here at the bottom, there is a link called Templates for Writing. If you click on that, it takes you to this page. And you’ll see there are paper templates for all sorts of different documents that you might work on over the course of your time at Walden. Now, not everybody is going to work on everything here because it’s all discipline specific or program specific.
But no matter what your program is, your formatting for your reference list is going to stay uniform across programs at Walden. So you can use the course paper template, even if you’re working on your dissertation and you want to see a sample reference list, this would be helpful. I’ll click on the one with advice.
And it’s going to download for me a template that’s pre-formatted in Walden and APA style– like this. So you’ll see– these aren’t things that we are going to cover in this webinar– some other information that you need to use when your formatting documents at Walden. And if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of your first course paper template, you’ll see a sample reference page.
So you can see exactly how references are meant to be formatted in APA style. You’ll see here the hanging indent. So you see the authors names all sticking out to the left. And they are flush here with the left-hand margin.
Here’s another little trick. You’ll see that these sliders up here on the ruler are moved so that this top one that’s pointing down is over here flesh with the left- hand one-inch margin. But these other two little ones, the little box and the little arrow that’s pointing up, are pointing at the half-inch mark. So they’re moved in half an inch.
If you set up your sliders like that on your ruler, your references are automatically going to format with a hanging indent. So I’ll show you how this works. So if I put my cursor right here, and then I press Enter or Return, my cursor is automatically going to go back to the left-hand margin of my document. But if I start typing, I’ll
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just type gibberish here so that I can show you how it works, and I don’t press Return, it indents half an inch. And it just jumped down like that because there weren’t any spaces.
So if you just type your reference in, it will automatically jump in a half an inch on the second line. Then if you press Enter at the end of your reference, it goes back out again. OK? So that’s really handy. Then you don’t have to go through and tab in all of your references– all the second, third, and fourth lines of your references. All right, other questions?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Especially for the students who may have to drop off, could you explain how they can email us with questions?
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Certainly, yep, I’ll go back to that final slide. We have some really great resources for any questions that you might still have after this webinar. The first one is, again, our website that I just showed you. There is tons of information there. Play around. Use the search box. That’s really helpful.
If you have specific writing-related questions that are shorter questions, not a whole paper, you can e-mail us at writingsupport@waldenu.edu. And we’ll respond to your question within 24 hours. This is a really great resource if you just have a shorter question and you don’t need your whole paper reviewed.
And then, finally, if you have questions about future webinars– if you have suggestions for webinars that you would like to see in the future or you want to know what the women offerings are– most of the webinar offerings are listed on our website. But if you do have questions, you can email this wcwebinars@waldenu.edu address as well. And our wonderful Beth, who’s in charge of webinars, will respond to you.
That’s all I have for my presentations. So, yeah, if we want to take five minutes of questions, I’m totally fine with that if there are more that would be helpful to answer out loud.
FEMALE SPEAKER: Brittany, I think there is one thing that would be helpful to go over together and that would be our common reference list example page on the website. We’ve had a lot of questions about individual different types of sources.
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Yep, I actually meant to do that. So thank you for reminding me. I want to show you all quickly this is the handout that you can download at the link that we provided at the beginning of the presentation. It’s linked there at the same place where you can get the slides and where you will be able to get the recording as soon as we finish here.
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And this actually helps you navigate our list of common references on our website. So it’s going to help you use that to sort of guide you through formatting a reference. Here is what our common reference list examples looks like. Actually, I should show the path for how to get there. So, again, we’re at this APA style tab. And I’m just going to click on it.
And I’m going to go down here on the left. And I’m going to click on this box here- – this link common reference list examples. And that’s how I got here to this common reference list examples. It’s also linked in the handout that I just showed you that you can find by the slides. So you’ll see here we have all sorts of common references that you might find in your research– an article with the DOI, an article with the URL, a book, a chapter in and edited book.
And it gets really specific. Now, we have another webinar in a couple of weeks’ time that my coworker, Sarah, will be presenting that is all about the weirder, more unusual source types and how the format references and in-text citations for those. So you can find information about that on our website. That’s going to be a really good and helpful webinar that will build on the information that you learned tonight. But, again, you can find information about those more unusual sources here on our website as well.
Something that’s really handy on this common reference list examples page is this View Detail button. A lot of people don’t notice this as they’re looking at our web page. But if you click on that, this new little window will pop up. And it annotates all the different sections of the reference that we talked about tonight. So it shows you what each part is. So here we have last names and first initials of authors. We have publication year.
Everything that we talked about tonight is differentiated for you here. And you can use this as a helpful template. So if you decide what source type you have first, then you find it in this list. And then you click detail. Then you know exactly what to pull out your raw data and what to put in. And then you can use this as a guide for how to format your references as well.
So this is a really, really helpful resource. I highly recommend that everybody use that as they’re formatting their reference list. Other questions?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Thanks, Brittany, we are just going through the question box. We may have one or two lingering questions here. But again, everyone remember that you can feel free to email us at writing support with your questions if they come up after the webinar.
BRITTANY KALLMAN ARNESON: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Well, if there’s nothing else that we need to answer out loud, I just want to thank you all so much for coming tonight. It was a pleasure presenting to you. And thanks for
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APA Citations Part 1: Methods to the Madness Content Attribution