Happy Valentine's Day!

   

The word of the day is love. We love helping people write with clarity and concision. We love debating fine points of grammar and usage. And, we love that, more than 5 years later, you continue to ask us new and interesting questions about APA Style points, keeping us current and keeping us on our toes!

Without APA Style, we wouldn’t be here, sharing this forum with you. With that in mind, and in honor of the day, we’ve each written a heartfelt haiku: odes to our favorite aspects of APA Style.

	For Students Who Ask Why      Why APA Style?      Precision and clarity      —for those that follow
Anne Breitenbach

	Author–Date Format      Ideas to text      “From whom and when?” I wonder      Author–date replies
David Becker

	The Header      Oh, running header      Where would I be without you?      Lost amongst pages
Katie Ten Hagen

	Redundancy      They were both alike      Loved as one and the same, but      Cut for concision.
Mary Lynn Skutley

	Reference citations      Author, date, title, and source      Pathways to knowledge
Chelsea Lee

	(a), (b), and (c)      letters in series      help with parallel structure      and readers thank you
Timothy McAdoo

Valentine's Day card image source: Peter-J-Pann, "valentine hat pcard"

2014 National Grammar Day

 

 

Happy National Grammar Day from the APA Style team!

 

For more, see http://nationalgrammarday.com/ (or #GrammarDay on Twitter)!

Happy New Year!

APA Publication Manual Is Now Available on Kindle

by Jeff Hume-Pratuch

 

You read that right: APA has just released the sixth edition of the APA Publication Manual as an e-book from the Amazon Kindle Store! (Sometimes the news is so nice, you have to say it twice.)

Keep reading for more details, or just click on over to Amazon and buy it now (you know you want to).

The manual is available from Amazon’s Kindle store as a Print Replica book. Each page in a Print Replica book looks just like the print version, with the same words and images in the same position, but it includes features such as annotation, highlighting, and zoom functions. Page numbers correspond to the print versions, so you can easily find the information you need. Reading progress is also synced across multiple Kindle apps, so you can “save the page” if you need to switch devices.

Kindle Print Replica books can be read on Kindle Fire tablets, Kindle for PC, Kindle for Android Tablets, Kindle for Mac, or Kindle for iPad reading apps (all available for free download from Amazon), but not on E Ink devices.

The manual’s companion volumes have also been released for the Kindle, so you can put an entire shelf-full of APA Style products on your tablet today!

 

	APA Publication Manual, Sixth Edition
	APA Style Guide to Electronic References, Sixth Edition
	Concise Rules of APA Style, Sixth Edition
	Presenting Your Findings, Sixth Edition
	Displaying Your Findings, Sixth Edition
	Reporting Research in Psychology

 

And now, back to the party!

Best of the APA Style Blog: Fall 2012 Edition

Each fall the APA Style Blog Team puts together a “best of” feature, and this year we continue the tradition with an updated set of posts from the APA Style Blog and our parent site, apastyle.org. We hope it will be helpful as new batches of students set upon the task of learning and implementing APA Style. You can get the full story in our sixth edition Publication Manual and our recently released APA Style Guide to Electronic References, plus more information via the links below.

Getting Started

What is APA Style?
Why is APA Style needed?
Basics of APA Style Tutorial
FAQs about APA Style

Sample Papers

Sample Paper 1
Sample Paper 2
Sample meta-analysis paper
Sample published APA article

General Reference Help

How in-text citations work
How to find the example you need in the Publication Manual 
How to deal with missing reference information

“How-To” Citation Help

E-books
Interviews
Legal references (constitutions, etc.)
Paraphrased work
PsycTESTS test database
Secondary sources (sources you found in another source)
Social media (Twitter, Facebook)
Website material
YouTube videos

Grammar Help

A versus an with acronyms and abbreviations
All versus none
Data is versus data are
Since versus because
That versus which
While versus although and whereas
Who versus that

Formatting Help

Capitalization
Running heads
Headings
Lists (lettered, numbered, or bulleted)
Margins
Spelling
Statistics

Keep in Touch!

We hope that these resources will be helpful to you as you write using APA Style. If you are interested in receiving tips about APA Style as well as general writing advice, we encourage you to follow us on social media. You can find us (and tell your friends) on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Add APA Style to Your Circles on Google+

As you might imagine, within the APA Style team, we have a mix of educational backgrounds and interests, with a significant overlap in writing, editing, psychology, and other social sciences. So when it comes to social media, we’re interested in all types of writing and social science resources.

We’ve found a plethora of said resources on Google+! We currently have hundreds of universities and university libraries in our circles, plus everyone from Grammar Girl and Merriam-Webster to Psychology World to the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Health.

Follow us to get official updates on all things related to APA Style, including announcements about new blog posts, tips and tricks on writing and style, new features on apastyle.org, and more!

What Did You Just Say?

by Trish Knowles

Imagine that you pick up a psychology journal and read “hypothesis testing often has a role to play even in meta-analysis and Bayesian analysis, but the hypotheses to be tested are different because they continue to pertain to the parameters of original interest.”

Are you thinking what I am? Ummm, what?!

Okay, there’s no need to panic. Close your eyes for a moment, breathe deeply a few times, maybe stretch a bit…. Better?

Now that your initial alarm at encountering jargon has subsided, let me introduce you to a great new tool from that can help: the APA Concise Dictionary of Psychology app for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

With more than 10,000 entries covering concepts, processes, and therapies across 90 subareas of psychology, the app gives you the power to unlock the mysteries of the field’s vocabulary—anytime and anywhere—with a mere tap of a finger. You can search terms, browse an alphabetical list, add notes about definitions, mark terms as favorites, and link directly between cross-references. The app also includes “Word of the Day” and “Historical Figures in Psychology” pop-ups, abbreviations and alternative spellings, search term suggestions, and several other useful features.

Test drive the free trial version with limited functionality (from iTunes or the Android Market) or jump right in and grab the full paid version instead (from iTunes or the Android Market).
If you’re more of a gotta-hold-it book-on-the-shelf kind of person, check out the print edition of this and other APA dictionaries and reference books here.

Now, where were we? Ah, yes:

Thus, in our view, the advantage of meta-analysis and Bayesian analysis is not so much that they avoid significance testing, but instead that they provide methods for accumulating information over multiple studies  in a manner that still focuses on the parameters of scientific interest, such as the magnitude of a treatment  effect.

Here's how to cite the app in APA Style:

American Psychological Association. (2012). APA concise dictionary of psychology (Version 1.0) [Mobile application software]. Retrieved from http://itunes.apple.com

        ___________________
Quotes are from Howard, G. S., Maxwell, S. E., & Fleming, K. J. (2000). The proof of the pudding: An illustration of the relative strengths of null hypothesis, meta-analysis, and Bayesian analysis. Psychological Methods, 5, 315-332. doi:10.1037/1082-989X.5.3.315

Best of the APA Style Blog: Fall 2011 Edition

by Chelsea Lee

Welcome back students and professors! Last fall we put together a “best of” feature on the blog, and this year we will continue the tradition with an updated set of posts from the APA Style Blog and our parent site, apastyle.org. We hope it will be helpful as new batches of students set upon the task of learning and implementing APA Style. You can get the full story in our sixth edition Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and extra guidance via the links below.

Getting Started With APA Style

What is APA Style?

Why is APA Style needed?

A tutorial for those totally new to APA Style

A tutorial for those using the 6th edition manual for the first time

FAQs about APA Style

Get the APA Publication Manual (6th ed.) 

 

Sample Papers in APA Style

Sample Paper 1

Sample Paper 2

Sample meta-analysis paper

Sample published APA article

 

What To Do If Your Reference Isn’t in the Manual (a.k.a. How References Work)

Learn how references work

 

How To Cite...  

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 

E-books

Facebook

Interviews

Legal references (constitutions, etc.)

Paraphrased work

Secondary sources (sources you found in another source)

Twitter

Website material

 

How to Format...

Running heads

Headings

Lists (lettered, numbered, or bulleted)

Margins

Spelling

Statistics

 

Still Need Help?

We have many resources to help you with your APA Style papers, and we think that you will find most questions are addressed in the Publication Manual (read Chapters 6 and 7 especially for help with references), on the blog, or in our FAQ. Please contact us if you need further assistance and we’ll be happy to help.

Finally, if you’re interested in receiving periodic tips about APA Style and notifications about new blog content, you can also keep in touch with us on Facebook and Twitter. 

Journal Article Reporting Standards: Why Are They Needed?

by Harris Cooper, PhD

Harris Cooper, PhD, was chair of the APA Journal Article Reporting Standards Working Group. He also served on the committee that revised the APA Publication Manual.

 With the holidays around the corner, nothing frustrates us more than incomplete assembly instructions for that bicycle or bookshelf. We fume over the instructions that are unclear or the list of materials that don’t quite match up with the material provided. There seems to be a screw missing. What is this piece for? Does the shelf go in before or after tightening the screws?

In many ways, a psychology research report is like assembly instructions. Without a complete list of the materials and a clear description of the assembly steps, it is impossible for others to understand what we did and what to do to repeat our experiment, if they so desire.

Recently, more people have become interested in what the psychological research says. But, with increased influence comes increased responsibility, and increased scrutiny. And, there has been a growing sense that the instructions in our research reports often do not serve us well.

A desire for “evidence-based” practice is widespread in public health, social services, and education. Before funding a program to, say, reduce drug abuse, improve academic achievement, or assist veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, the people who control the purse strings want “solid evidence” the program works. Solid evidence means that the studies that purport to evaluate programs and interventions allow confident conclusions about program effectiveness. And, to make this judgment, the research write-ups need to include clear instructions and an accurate list of materials.  How else will they know whether studies’ results are to be believed?

In addition to this need for easy replication is a desire for uniformity in discussing results.  The amount of psychological research is growing rapidly. When researchers summarize studies, be they about basic topics—such as the influences on memory or the development of morality through the life span—or applied topics, they need to have good descriptions of what was done. Like assembly instructions, these descriptions are used to piece together past research into coherent pictures, to help resolve conflicts in research results, and to identify questions yet to be studied. If the research description is incomplete, it is like assembly instructions that result in a bicycle that we can’t ride or a bookshelf that will collapse.

Not surprising then, greater emphasis today is placed on the reporting of research. So, in preparation for the sixth edition of the Publication Manual, APA formed a working group to look into the issue. As a result, the Publication Manual now recommends that Journal Article Reporting Standards (or the JARS) be followed that summarize the information editors, reviewers, and readers will expect to see in research reports. APA has just released a book I authored to help writers understand and implement the new standards, titled Reporting Research in Psychology: How to Meet Journal Article Reporting Standards. So, how do the JARS work? Find out in next week’s post.

 

Translations of the Publication Manual

Anne Woodworth Gasque

This month the latest edition of the Publication Manual will be released in Spanish! Que bueno!  This event marks a long partnership with Manual Moderno, the distinguished Mexico City publisher whose first translation of the Publication Manual began with the fourth edition.  In addition to the Publication Manual, Spanish-speaking readers will find translated versions of the Concise Rules of APA Style and of Mastering APA Style.

If Spanish is not your native language, don’t despair.  We’re currently working with international publishing partners who are translating the manual into Arabic, Simple Chinese, Italian, Nepalese, Polish, Romanian, and Portugese, for starters.  We’ll let you know when those translations are available.  It’s hard to believe that what started as a six-page article in an APA journal (Psychological Bulletin) in 1929 that outlined simple style rules (including instructions for submitting drawings wrapped flat against stiff cardboard or rolled on tubes) has evolved into the current 272-page Publication Manual that offers guidance on bias-free language, writing style, and electronic references and is used around the world. 

How would you cite a translation of the Publication Manual? The sixth edition of the Publication Manual includes an example of a non-English reference book translated into English on page 205 (Example 28). Here is what the Spanish translation of the sixth edition would look like:

American Psychological Association. (2010). Manual de publicaciones de la American Psychological Association [Publication manual of the American Psychological Association] (3rd ed.). Mexico City, Mexico: Manual Moderno.

The translation of the title appears in brackets immediately after the non-English title.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to contact us with questions about other types of translated sources.