by Chuck

[Yesterday and the day before, we looked at the first two Rs of APA style, readability and replicability. Today, our short survey of the Rs concludes.]

Third R: retrievability. Our third R is directly connected to the first, readability, and is thematically similar to the second, replicability. Retrievability refers to the reference list at the end of your manuscript. This list is the repository of your intellectual source material. Chapter 6 of the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association begins, “Scientific knowledge represents the accomplishments of many researchers over time. A critical part of the writing process is helping readers place your contribution in context by citing the researchers who influenced you” (p. 169). In our discussion of the first R back in Part 1, we saw that APA style improves readability by requiring just author name and year in the main text rather than a complex, heavily bibliographic footnoting apparatus.

Citing author name and year in the main text, however, is just the tip of the citation iceberg. Your reference list is the submerged remainder of that berg—and the majority of it. As you navigate through the sixth edition’s chapters on source crediting and reference examples (Chapters 6 & 7, respectively), you may feel somewhat frustrated both by the variety of references that APA recognizes and by the amount of punctilious detail within each individual reference-list entry.

My counsel? Try not to forget the true goal behind it all: retrievability. Any reference-list entry exists for the primary purpose of escorting an interested reader to a particular item you’ve used in your research and writing.

Just as the Method section makes the practical aspects of your study replicable, so does the reference list make the intellectual backdrop of your work retrievable. As the saying goes, it gives credit where credit is due. And all that information is backloaded into a reference list instead of being located elsewhere in the paper to render the main text, your text, more readable.

In the end, one writes to be understood. The three Rs of APA style I’ve identified here, working through the various parts of your manuscript as set out in the sixth edition of the Publication Manual, can bring maximum clarity to your descriptions of what you thought, what you did, and what you learned. Thereby, APA style can assist in giving your work its widest possible reach.

by Chuck

Second R: replicability. The first place where you, as a writer of research articles, will deal with replicability is in the Method section of your manuscript. There, you will explain how your experiments were set up, which hypotheses prompted your inquiry, what equipment you used, who your participants included, what type or types of data you gathered, how those raw data were obtained, and more.

Subsequently, in the Results section, you will detail how you analyzed your data and what was revealed by the analyses. Chapter 2 of the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association goes into all this at length. It’s worth taking time here, however, to remind ourselves of why all this is necessary.

Simply put, your manuscript has to depict your work in enough detail so that any reader could, if he or she were minded to, replicate your study exactly. APA has no monopoly on this approach. Rather, the discipline of psychology shares it with all other sciences. Replicability allows for falsifiability.

I’m not calling your research into question or impugning your honor. Falsifiability is one of the cornerstones of the scientific method. Any experimental science involves it. It’s also referred to as refutability (hey, hey, hey, another R).

As Karl Popper, the noted philosopher of science, said, “The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability” (Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 1963, p. 36). He meant not that all scientific knowledge is false but that, to be scientific, knowledge must be testable so if it is false, this can be demonstrated and recognized. Built into the scientific method, then, is the belief that experiments must be repeatable, if only to show that their results are not flukes or errors.

And this is why you want to explain what you’ve done sufficiently well so that another person can replicate it.

[Tomorrow, “The 3 Rs of APA Style” will conclude with the third R.]

by Chuck

No, not those three Rs. Readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithmetic are important and all. But the three Rs I’m talking about are those especially pertinent to APA style.

First R: readability. One of the goals of APA style is to make an article more readable.

Consider the use of footnotes. Essentially, you’re encouraged not to use them, or, if you have to use them, not to use them much. The sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association says of what it calls content footnotes, “Because they can be distracting to readers, [they] should be included only if they strengthen the discussion. . . . In most cases, an author integrates an article best by presenting important information in the text, not in a footnote” (pp. 37–38). This isn’t a new stance. As far back as 1929, in the first iteration of the Publication Manual, authors were being advised, “Footnotes should be avoided when the material can be suitably incorporated in the text” (“Instructions in Regard to Preparation of Manuscript,” 1929, Psychological Bulletin, 26, p. 60).

Now there’s nothing academically shameful about footnoting. If you don’t believe me, take a gander at any legal or historical journal. You’re more than likely to see not merely pages thick with footnotes but even—and often—pages with only a handful of lines of actual text resting on a massive foundation of footnotes.

In APA style, however, a choice has been made not to head in this direction, which improves the basic readability of the text. With footnotes, the reader must interrupt perusal of the narrative, drop eyes to the bottom of the page or the back of the article, absorb and interpret the noted material, return to the original spot in the text and recapture the original train of thought—and then, at the next footnote, repeat the process. With APA style, there is instead a quick in-text nod to the supporting authority or crucial source material—surname(s) and year—and then it’s right back to the narrative. The reader has little time to grow distracted from the writer’s point.

I suspect that this valuation of the main text is rooted in psychology’s literary side. The profession has a great written tradition running in parallel with its scientific one. To name but two psychologists also famed for their literary accomplishments, think of Sigmund Freud and William James (incidentally, APA Past-President, 1894 & 1904), both of whose works are still in print today, perused not just by members of the profession and historians of science but also by literary scholars and even that rarest of birds, the common reader.

[Tomorrow, “The 3 Rs of APA Style” will continue with the second R.]

by Stefanie

Tables are a terrific way to share, compare, and contrast data. Strongholds of information, display cases for results, tables are a “just the facts, ma’am” approach to reporting important methods or findings of your work.

APA Style can help you create clean and clear tables. An unbreakable rule in table formatting is to make it as easy as possible for readers to understand at a glance the nature of the information you are presenting. Here are some general guidelines to keep in mind when starting your table:

1. In general, use 12-point type, double-spacing, and 1-inch margins. If these specifications need to be adjusted for clarity, for example, to keep the table on one page, then do so rather than forcing readers to flip back and forth to a new page for a single column or the final two rows of data. However, if small adjustments do not work, do not be afraid to use extra pages for extra data. Single-spaced six-point type is not reader friendly.
2. Portrait or landscape orientation is fine—use what is appropriate for your presentation.
3. Label every row and column, even if what is in that row or column seems obvious or the label is repeated in the table title. Do not forget a heading for the stub (first) column!
4. Position table entries that are to be compared next to each other.
5. Consider how the order in which you present data conveys your meaning. For example, if you are creating a table to report the results of the battery of tests you gave your participants, will you present the test results in the order in which you gave the tests to show the progress, if any, the participants made from test to test, or will you present the test results in the order of highest average score to lowest average score to show which tests were more effective at isolating the variable you were testing?
6. In general, different indices should be put in separate parts or lines of tables, even means and standard deviations when possible.
7. Keep tables lean. That is, include only essential data in your table. A cluttered table does not convey as much as a streamlined one does, despite its extra bulk.
8. Ensure that your table can be understood apart from the text. Define every abbreviation and explain any quirks in the table note, not the narrative.

Once you have finished your table, where it goes in the manuscript depends on what sort of manuscript you have written. If you have completed an article to be submitted for publication, put the table at the end after the references and author note but before the figures, and make sure the table is mentioned at least once in the text (so the editors and reviewers know when to look for it). If you have written a dissertation or report for class, check with your dissertation committee or professor. Many educators prefer to have tables placed in text at approximately the place the tables are mentioned, and they certainly get the final say on table placement when they are doing the grading!

More information is available on pages 127–150 of Chapter 5 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, sixth edition.

by Chuck

Whether you’re proofreading a finished reference list or trying to cobble together a citation for a new or nonroutine communications format, understanding what information any reference should contain will help you in your task. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is intended to be both explanatory and fairly comprehensive. Nonetheless, there is no way on earth it could set out examples for every possible type of reference. It does, however, offer an approach for the construction of new sorts of references beyond the various types it catalogues. That approach has been specifically illustrated in this blog already, by earlier postings about manufacturing reference entries for Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Now I’d like to teach you how to fish, as it were, by taking a more general look.

What is that approach? You just need to know the basic building blocks—namely, the generic elements that nearly all references in APA style contain—and then you can adapt them to your particular needs.

The sixth edition of the Publication Manual lays the requirements out pretty bluntly. “Each entry usually contains the following elements: author, year of publication, title, and publishing data—all the information necessary for unique identification and library search” (p. 180). Another way to think of these building blocks, a mnemonic to use in your own construction and review of references, is to remember four interrogatories: Who? When? What? Where?

To be less cryptic and more lengthy, the quartet of queries can be expanded thus: Who created this reference? When was this reference created? What is this reference called? Where does this reference come from (or, Where can my reader find this reference)? Let’s look at these four questions one at a time.

Who created this reference?
The author component is pretty straightforward: the writer(s) of the article, anthology chapter, or book entire; the editor of a compilation; the producer and director of a motion picture; the writer of a letter, an e-mail, or a blog posting; and so on. On the rare occasion when no authorship is attributed and, per APA style, you revert to a title entry (e.g., Publication Manual, p. 200, example 9; p. 205, example 30), this initial whodunnit is still answered. The title entry implicitly tells your reader, “Authorship was checked for but despite the best efforts of the citer, no such information was either given or obtainable.”

When was this reference created?
In most cases, a year will suffice to answer this question. A few reference types require more: for instance, year followed by month for papers and poster sessions presented at conferences (Publication Manual, pp. 206–207), or year followed by month and day for newspaper articles (pp. 200–201) and e-mails and blog posts (pp. 214–215). When no year is available or can be ascertained by hook or by crook, this element is maintained by using the abbreviation n.d., for “no date” (p. 185; p. 203, example 20; p. 205, example 30).

What is this reference called?
Note that here I am referring to the title of the thing referenced itself, not to any larger “container” in which the specific thing referenced may reside. (Information about that container will be part of the fourth generic-reference element, discussed further on.) For instance, as regards a journal article, all of the “what” element is the title of the article, not the name of the journal in which that article appears. (As said above, that journal name will be used later on.) So, too, with a chapter in an edited book: The “what” is the title of the chapter only. The name of the edited book in which the chapter resides is not the “what” described here.

If the item you are referencing does not have a formal title, APA style requires you to provide something to fill out this part of the reference. If no title exists, you must fill in the blank yourself. To indicate that this is your invention, not a formal title, your coined title should be enclosed in square brackets (Publication Manual, p. 209, example 47; p. 212, example 60).

Where does this reference come from (or, Where can my reader find this reference)?
Once you’ve given the author name(s), the year, and the name of the thing being referred to, anything and everything else in the reference entry constitutes the answer to this final question of “where.” References come in more varieties than Baskin-Robbins has ice creams, though, so this portion of a reference has the most permutations. It ranges from the basic journal name, volume, and page span for journal articles to the online versions where that information is supplemented with a DOI or URL. A book chapter’s “where” can be quite involved, what with listing editor name(s), the book’s overall title, a page span, and publisher location and name. References to books available online may dispense with the publisher information, replacing it with a DOI or URL. And books and journals are just the tip of the reference iceberg. There’s a host of new formats (podcasts, tweets, etc.) and a world of nonroutine formats that aren’t necessarily bleeding-edge new (e.g., cuneiform tablets in the British Museum).

All this may sound like a fair amount of ground to cover. Still, it's worth remembering that nearly always, regardless of what sort of reference you're trying to cite, or create, it will rest sturdily on the four-legged framework of who, when, what, and where.

by Chelsea Lee

Previously I talked about how to cite Twitter and Facebook posts or feeds in general, which you can do quite easily by mentioning the URLs in text (with no reference list entries required).

Today I address some of the issues pertaining to citing particular posts, which require both reference list entries and in-text citations. As you may have noticed, the Publication Manual does not give specific guidance on how to do this. This is an evolving area, and blog discussions will be considered as we create guidelines related to these new references sources for future APA Style products.

What to do in the meantime? Below are examples of one approach to citing tweets and Facebook updates. Until more definitive guidance is available, feel free to use this approach or another that is also clear and gives the reader enough information about the source to be able to locate it.

First, here are screenshots of my examples from Twitter and Facebook (click to enlarge): 

The suggested reference list entries below generally follow the format for citation of online sources (see pp. 214–215):

BarackObama. (2009a, July 15). Launched American Graduation Initiative 
  to help additional 5 mill. Americans graduate college by 2020: 
  http://bit.ly/gcTX7 [Twitter post]. Retrieved from 
  http://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/2651151366 

Barack Obama. (2009b, October 9). Humbled. 
  http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/obamaforamerica/gGM45m 
  [Facebook update]. Retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/posted.php? 
  id=6815841748&share_id=154954250775&comments=1#s154954250775 

Here’s the rationale I used for presenting each element in the reference: 

• I included the author name as written (not changing BarackObama or Barack Obama to Obama, B.; see Example 76, p. 215). For simplicity’s sake and to ensure accuracy, it’s best to include names as written for Facebook and Twitter citations. 

• Alphabetize under B, not O, ignoring the space (i.e., BarackObama and Barack Obama are treated the same, so you would next arrange them chronologically; see also section 6.25 of the manual, pp. 181–182). 

• The date includes the year and day, but not the time. The date gives ample specificity without adding an element of how to format times, which isn’t done anywhere else in APA Style. 

• To differentiate among posts from the same person in the same year (or even the same day), you can include ”a” or “b” after the year, in chronological order. If you have only one post from the writer in a year, then it is not necessary to include “a” or “b.” 

• I included the whole post in the title position (mine included a URL, so I included that too). Facebook updates, however, might be quite long—if that is the case, you might use a truncated version of the post in the title position. 

• It’s helpful to provide a description of form inside brackets, such as Twitter post or Facebook update. 

• The URL leads directly to the post rather than to the feed in general, in order to be as direct and specific as possible about what is being cited. Click the date and time stamp beneath the post in question (seen in the screenshots) and you will be taken to the individual status update page with its own URL.

For in-text citations, parenthetical citation may be easiest:

President Obama announced the launch of the American Graduation Initiative 
(BarackObama, 2009a). He also stated that he was “humbled” to have 
received the Nobel Peace Prize (Barack Obama, 2009b). 

One last issue is retrievability. Because online social media are more about live updates than archiving, we don’t know if these status update pages will still be here in a year, or 5, or 20 years. So if you are writing for publication, it may be prudent to self-archive any social media updates you include in your articles (check out this post by Gunther Eysenbach on some ways to do this).

What’s Next

I hope to bring you more in the future on citing social media posts, for example, citing hash-tagged conversations—although first we must figure out how to securely archive them (the adorably named Twapper Keeper might meet this need).

How have you addressed citing, archiving, and retrieving tweets and other social media posts in your field of expertise?

 by Chelsea Lee

Because posts from online social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, are not yet often fodder for scholarly research, specific reference examples aren’t included in the Publication Manual. Well, whenever you need a reference format for something that’s not explicitly covered in the manual, you can adapt our examples to meet your needs (see p. 193). I’ll show you how, using example posts from President Obama’s Facebook and Twitter pages.

To cite a Twitter or Facebook feed as a whole or to discuss it in general, it is sufficient to give the site URL in text, inside parentheses. There is no need for a reference list entry.           

President Obama uses Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/barackobama) and 
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/barackobama) to keep citizens up 
to speed on his initiatives, especially health care reform and Supreme 
Court nominations. 

 It’s the same method you’d use to cite a website as a whole (see this FAQ).

 On Monday I will address citing particular Twitter or Facebook posts.

by Timothy McAdoo

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. made this famous declaration on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It may be the most famous American speech ever given, and it’s certainly oft-quoted. 

But how do you properly cite a speech in APA Style?  The answer may surprise you. You don’t reference the speech itself!

Even for a speech you may know by heart, you should find an authoritative source for the text. Then you simply reference the book, video documentary, website, or other source for the quotation. The reference format you need will depend on the type of document you’ve used. 

For example, if you’ve found Dr. King’s speech in a book of great speeches, your reference might be as follows. 

Smith, J. (Ed.). (2009). Well said! Great speeches in American history. 
   Washington, DC: E & K Publishing.

The in-text citation would include the surname of the author or editor of the source document and the year of publication.  For example, your sentence might look like this: 

Of course, you can find speeches in a wide variety of sources. Consider two ends of the spectrum: You might find an embedded video in a blog post and use Example 76 (“Blog post,” p.  215 of the Publication Manual), or you might find a lone, dusty copy of an audiotape in an archive and use Example 69 (“Interview recorded and available in an archive,” p. 214). 

What’s your favorite source for great speeches?

by Timothy McAdoo

“I’m quoting Johnny Depp from an interview I read in a magazine. But the Publication Manual has no reference format for interviews. What do I do?”

I’ve always said there are two types of interviews in this world: those you conducted and those you didn’t! Let’s look at both. 

The guidance on p. 179 of the Publication Manual about citing personal communications mentions “personal interviews” as one example. Let’s say you interview a professor about her lifetime of work in the field of industrial and organizational psychology. Because a reader would not be able to find your interview in print or online, no recoverable data are available. You’ll need to use the “personal communication” in-text citation style shown on p. 179.

Of course, these days it can be easy to make your data recoverable. If you have a blog or another publishing outlet online, you could post the text of your interview. Then you’d want to follow the appropriate reference format.  If you’ve posted to your blog, for example, use the Example 76 (“Blog post”) on p. 215 of the Publication Manual. 

Finally, if you’ve simply read an interview conducted by someone else, you should pick the reference format appropriate for the source. If you read the interview in a magazine, for example, you’d want to follow Example 7 (“Magazine article”) on p. 200.

I hope this post clears up that small point of confusion about citing interviews. Some of my favorite interviews are from Studs Terkel’s oral histories. What are yours?

by Timothy McAdoo

First things first. Is it a good idea to cite Wikipedia in your research paper? Generally speaking, no. In fact, if you’re writing a paper as a class assignment, your teacher may specifically prohibit citing Wikipedia. Scholarly papers should generally rely on peer-reviewed and other scholarly work vetted by experts in the field.

Does this mean Wikipedia contains bad information? Not at all. It is a great way to get an overview of a topic that might be new to you. And, because many Wikipedia entries contain thorough citations, they can be good starting points to find the original source materials you do want to use. Don’t quote or paraphrase from the Wikipedia entry in your paper, but check the entry’s Reference section to find links to more authoritative sources. And be sure to find and read these sources to verify the facts, figures, and points of view they present.

But, of course, there are times when citing a Wikipedia entry itself is appropriate. For example, let’s say you are writing a paper on how social media and crowdsourcing influence definitions of common psychology terms. Wikipedia would be one excellent source for this topic!

Example 30 (“Entry in an online reference work, no author or editor”) from p. 205 of the Publication Manual can be used for Wikipedia or other wikis. The following example is for the Wikipedia entry on “psychology.” Note that the retrieval date is needed in this case because, as true for any wiki entry, the source material may change over time.

Psychology. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved October 14, 2009, from
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology