The Three Rs of APA Style, Part 2

by Chuck

[Yesterday, we looked at the first R of APA style, readability. Today, our short survey of the Rs continues.]

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.]

The Three Rs of APA Style, Part 1

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.]

How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part II: Reference List Entries and In-Text Citations

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?

How to Cite Twitter and Facebook, Part I: General

 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.

How to Cite a Speech in APA Style

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: 

Dr. King declared, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed” (Smith, 2009).

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?

APA Style for Citing Interviews

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?

How to Cite Wikipedia in APA Style

 

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

Note to APA Style Community: Sixth Edition Corrections

We are grateful for the lively and thoughtful discussion that has resulted from the release of the sixth edition of the Publication Manual on this blog and also among other APA Style communities. We recently learned of a post on a listserv regarding corrections to the manual that has caused much alarm among members of the APA Style community and, despite good intentions, includes misleading and erroneous information. We would like to clarify the nature and extent of the errors in the sixth edition and tell you how you can access the corrections online.

First, we’d like to verify that the first printing of the Publication Manual is substantively correct, accurate, and fully functional in all areas except for three sample papers that have been corrected and are posted on the web for download.

The first printing was carefully proofed and vetted at multiple stages. The guidance provided in the book is accurate and sound.

Errors in the sample papers, which were relatively minor, have been corrected. You and your students can access the corrected sample papers at http://www.apastyle.org clicking first on "Related Resources" and selecting the "Sample Papers" option from the left-hand column.

We urge you to download the papers from the website and, while you’re there, to take advantage of the free tutorials, FAQs, and other instructional aids that we’ve developed to help readers transition to the new edition of the Publication Manual.

As with the fifth edition of the manual, corrections made to the first and subsequent printings of the manual are posted online. The complete list of errors that will be corrected in the second printing of the Publication Manual can be found at http://www.apastyle.org by clicking on "Supplemental Materials" and selecting "Reprint Corrections" at the bottom of the page. The majority of these are typographical errors that do not affect the content and guidance in the chapters.

We appreciate the efforts of all who have taken the time to send in and point out small typographical errors. We have responded quickly to make corrections as needed, first by posting the corrected sample papers and second by posting a list of typographical errors in all chapters on our website for immediate accessibility for users.

Sayonara to the “Well-Known City” Rule in APA Style

by Anne Breitenbach

For those of you familiar with the previous editions of the APA Publication Manual, be aware that the “well-known city” exception for reference citations is no more. Briefly, the old rule was to provide the state, province (if applicable), or country as well as the city for book and other nonperiodical publishers except in the case of certain cities that were described as “major cities that are well known for publishing” (p. 217, 5th edition). Thus, for example, a reference list entry for a publisher from Baltimore need and should not list MD as part of the location element. The author was to assume that the reader would be familiar with Baltimore and know that it is in the state of Maryland.

That rule has disappeared in the new edition, and the examples specifically show cities that once were on the exception list now being followed with the state abbreviation (e.g., New York, NY, p. 187). Though no specific reason is given for the change, it is noted in the Foreword that the manual is now available “in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, and many other languages.” Perhaps it was felt that a student in Korea might not understand why Baltimore and not Seoul made the exceptions list. Baltimore and six other American cities were on the list, but indisputably well-known cities outside of the United States were not well represented. A quick review of the world’s most populous cities is instructive: Only three of the “well-known” cities are even among the top 20 in population (http://www.worldatlas.com/geoquiz/thelist.htm), leaving the citizens of Shanghai (No. 1), Mumbai (No. 2), and Buenos Aires (No. 3), among others, to wonder why their cities need more definite placement than Philadelphia (No. 53), San Francisco (No. 60), or Baltimore, which doesn’t make the list of even the top 100 in population size.

The choice was simple. Either create and try to maintain a list that more accurately reflects cities well-known for publishing to a wider scholarly global community or make no assumptions about which cities are well-known to whom. The second option was seen as the better choice.

What to Use—The Full Document URL or Home Page URL?

by Paige Jackson

Following on from Annie’s post yesterday on URLs, today I wanted to share some tips that might help in deciding what to use when. With the increasing predominance of electronic publishing, it’s a challenge to know how best to cite documents you find online. The DOI is the gold standard, and eventually all documents will have their own DOIs. In the meantime, it’s not always easy to know what to do. If you find a document on the Internet (but not from a database) that you want to cite for which there is no DOI, is it better to cite the full document URL or the publisher home page URL?

The question to ask before deciding which to include is, Which will be most helpful to the reader in locating the document? The following are some instances when the homepage URL would be most helpful (all examples refer to Chapter 7 in the Publication Manual):

• Subscription wall—If the document is available online only by subscription, the document URL would not be accessible by nonsubscribers. The homepage URL, however, lets the reader know who the publisher is and therefore what databases the reader might look to to access the document.
• Unstable document URL—If the publisher is one for which document URLs are subject to change, the home page URL is more likely to be helpful (see Examples 11 and 19a).

In the following cases, the full document URL is likely to take the reader to the source more reliably:

• Publisher website that’s difficult to search—Some publisher homepages—such as those of government agencies or nongovernmental organizations—can be difficult to search, so citing the full URL for a document that takes the reader directly to the document may save time (see Examples 9, 31, and 33).
• Message posted to a blog or other online forum—Similarly, it can be difficult to locate a particular message on a blog website, so providing the URL that will lead the reader to the message would be the best choice (see Examples 74–77).

This list is not exhaustive—we hope it will give a sense of factors that should guide your decision. A URL is imperfect in pointing the reader to an electronic source, but for many sources, it’s the best we can do. So don’t belabor the issue—make an informed guess as to whether the publisher home page URL or the full document URL is more likely to lead the reader to the document in question, and move on!