That Versus Which

 

 

by Tyler Krupa

This week, we address another item on the list of frequent APA Style points that writers find most challenging (on the basis of the article by Onwuegbuzie, Combs, Slate, & Frels, 2010; also see their guest post to our blog): the use of that instead of which.

According to the 6th edition of the APA Publication Manual (p. 83), APA prefers for writers to use the term that for clauses that are essential to the meaning of the sentence. These types of clauses are referred to as restrictive clauses. The term which should be used for clauses that merely add further information to the sentence that is not essential to its meaning. These types of clauses are referred to as nonrestrictive clauses and should be set off with commas.

To help clear up any confusion regarding the proper use of these terms, let’s begin with looking at some examples of that being used correctly:

It is important to include additional predictors of alcohol or other substance use disorders that were present before treatment. A poor economy can create and stimulate forces that operate at multiple levels of a society to influence those operating within it. One way to predict who may benefit from posttraumatic stress disorder treatment is to investigate variables that impact naturalistic recovery.

Note that in each example above, the meaning of the sentence is not properly conveyed if the that clause is not included. These clauses are essential to understanding the sentences and therefore are restrictive.

Now for comparison, let’s look at some examples of which being used correctly:

In the Level 2 equations, the r terms represent random effects, which describe provider variation for the intercept and various client effects. Binge eating disorder symptom counts, which are identified in Figure 2, were used at each time point. One key difficult child characteristic is hyperactivity/impulsivity, which has been proposed to contribute to the development of oppositional defiant disorder by eliciting negative family functioning.

Note that in these examples, if you remove the which clause from the sentences, the meaning of each sentence is still conveyed. The which clauses are just providing additional information to the reader and therefore are nonrestrictive.

Consistent use of that for restrictive clauses and which for nonrestrictive clauses will help make your writing clear and precise. If you still have questions regarding the proper use of these terms after reviewing the examples above, feel free to leave a comment, which we will reply to as soon as possible.

APA Style Interactive Learning

Anne Gasque

Have you ever had the urge to read the Publication Manual from beginning to end? We thought not. 

It takes a special kind of stamina and devotion to approach a manual of writing guidance and style rules with the excitement a person might bring to, say, John Grisham’s latest legal thriller. To help you find your way in the manual, we’ve created an interactive online course. This course, available for continuing education credit, provides a comprehensive tour of the guidance in the Publication Manual. 

Basics of APA Style: An Online Course follows the organization of the manual and offers an in-depth overview of the types of articles used in psychological and social research, manuscript elements, heading style, reducing bias in language, punctuation, capitalization, italics, numbers, tables, figures, citing references in text, creating a reference list, and reference templates and examples. Many of the sections in the course include relevant examples to provide context, and each section ends with two or three review questions to help you learn as you go along. The course ends with 20 assessment questions and offers 4 CE credits upon successful completion. We hope you find the course a helpful tool for learning APA Style!

If you would like a broader less detailed overview of APA Style, we offer a free tutorial, The Basics of APA Style, which shows you how to structure and format your work, recommends ways to reduce bias in language, identifies how to avoid charges of plagiarism, shows how to cite references in text, and provides selected reference examples.

Citing a Streaming Video Database

By Anne Breitenbach

Some time ago, we had a post that explained how to find a DOI and provided a brief YouTube video of the process. We asked at the time for requests for tutorials about APA Style that could be useful. In response to that request, we were asked to create tutorials to explain how to cite content from two new databases APA launched in fall 2011.

We previously published a post on the first of these, PsycTESTS, a research database that provides descriptive and administrative information about tests, as well as access to some psychological tests, measures, scales, and other assessments. In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at how you’d cite PsycTHERAPY, a research database of therapy sessions. In order to create the reference in APA Style, you must analyze what you are actually citing: audiovisual media (streaming video) available only through a subscription database (PsycTHERAPY).

Take a look:

 

Can't Find It in the Publication Manual!

by Stefanie

The most common question—other than “How do I cite a website?”—that we get here is actually more of a panicked or frustrated declaration: “I can’t find this in the Publication Manual!” We understand: The manual is thick with information, and it takes time to familiarize yourself with it. Here are a few hints for finding what it is you might be looking for in the Publication Manual.
 
Formatting Specifics
 
Section 8.03, Preparing the Manuscript for Submission (pp. 228–230), covers all of the details you need to ensure that your manuscript formatting is consistent. This section includes information on font size and style (bottom of p. 228; 12-point Times New Roman), line spacing (top of p. 229; double-space everything from title to text to headings to references to figure captions), margins (middle of p. 229; uniform margins of at least 1 in. should appear at the top, bottom, left, and right of every page), and order of manuscript pages (pp. 229–230).
 
Many of these elements are also covered on the Checklist for Manuscript Submission (pp. 241–243).
 
Electronic References
 
Look closely at the sample references provided in Chapter 7: Many show examples of electronic versions of sources (e.g., journal articles, newspaper articles, books, book chapters, dissertations, reports).
 
If you retrieve a source from a database, see the third and fourth bullet points on page 192 for additional guidance on creating a reference for it.
 
Potpourri
 
The sample papers are full of formatting examples, along with handy tags showing where those formatting guidelines can be found in the Publication Manual proper. See pages 41–59 for examples of number style, hyphenation, punctuation, citation, statistics, references, headings, order of pages, tables, and figures.
 
What part of the Publication Manual has been most helpful to you?
 

 

The Long and the Short of It

by Stefanie

The goal of writing, especially scholarly writing, is to convey information. Accomplishing that task certainly involves choosing the right words, but have you also considered the length of the sentences and paragraphs in which those words appear? Onwuegbuzie, Combs, Slate, and Frels (2010) include too-short and too-long paragraphs on their list of common APA Style mistakes. Labeling these style choices mistakes may seem harsh, but if you lose readers because of the style of your presentation, the term is apt.

The troubles that come with lengthy sentences and paragraphs are more obvious than those that accompany short ones. I suspect anyone who reads has, at some point, drifted off in the middle of a long, run-on sentence. And woe be to the person who has his or her reading interrupted in the middle of a page-long paragraph! Good luck finding your place and the train of thought after that. (Whatever you do, please don’t try to write the longest sentence in English; the current record holders are legendary.)

Short sentences (insert obligatory Hemingway reference here) and paragraphs can be easily read and digested, but a bunch of either can be choppy, abrupt, even boring. Imagine a Results section that followed this pattern throughout:

    The mean was 8.8.

    The standard deviation was 9.9.

    The results were nonsignificant.

This would get old fast. (Incidentally, you may want to consider a table rather than short or long sentences for numerical results.)

A blend of long and short sentences in a paragraph is ideal. Paragraph length is a little trickier. Single-sentence paragraphs are discouraged. As for long paragraphs, as noted on page 68 of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, sixth edition, “if a paragraph runs longer than one double-spaced manuscript page, you may lose your readers. Look for a logical place to break a long paragraph, or reorganize the material.”

Have further questions about sentence and paragraph length? Please comment below or write to styleexpert@apa.org.

 

The Grammar of Mathematics: Percentage or %?

by Timothy McAdoo

As Chelsea so succinctly noted in her recent post about how statistical terms are introduced and used in APA Style manuscripts, “in the social sciences, the worlds of grammar and mathematics intersect.” Thus, when you first start to write about statistical results, you may encounter style questions that you’ve not considered before. In today’s post, I answer one such question:

Question: How do you decide whether to use the percentage symbol (%) or the word percentage?

Answer: Use the symbol only when it is preceded by a numeral; otherwise, spell out the word percentage.

For example,

What percentage of wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? In Experiment 1, we used a computer simulation to address this timeless question. The woodchucks (who would chuck) chucked 86.4% of the wood available during the test. This was a larger percentage than we hypothesized. Two woodchucks (33.3% of the virtual subjects) would not chuck wood (see Table 1).

You’ll find these guidelines on page 118 of the Publication Manual. On the same page, the Manual also notes just one exception: "In table headings and figure legends, use the symbol % to conserve space."

Brevity Is the Soul of Lingerie (and Abstracts)

by Anne Breitenbach

Coming back at long last to my promised series on abstracts, let’s begin with the first clause of the Publication Manual description in section 2.04: “An abstract is a brief, comprehensive summary of the contents of the article.” Our focus in this post is the “brief” part of that instruction. Your job as abstract writer is to give the prospective reader the essential information as succinctly as possible. Although you’re not quite reduced to haiku, you are restricted to what's crucial. 

In Chapter 2, which covers manuscript structure and content, section 2.04 gives us a number of specifics.  It notes that if you are preparing a paper for a specific journal, then that journal may well provide information on the abstract somewhere in the instructions to authors. Read that information. Abide by it. The most common instruction is likely to be about length. For APA journals, for instance, the instructions read, “All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words.”  If yours exceeds a limit, it may be cut arbitrarily wherever the limit falls, or it may be hacked apart by a copyeditor who has firm instructions on what to take out and what to leave in, which may well not agree with your opinion. Likewise, if you are creating an abstract for an instructor or in accordance with university guidelines, you should check and see whether they have guidelines you need to abide by.  

But back to section 2.04, here are some “don’ts”:

• Do not include [oops. I’m afraid I just hit 250 words in these two paragraphs and so am out of space. Yes, that’s what 250 words look like. Not very long is it?] information that doesn’t appear in the manuscript. 

• Do not evaluate in the abstract—instead, report [“I did” not “I believe”].

• Do not get bogged down with nouns when there’s a sturdy verb available [“used” not “the utilization of”].

• Do not use passive voice when active makes sense [“Bill ate five sandwiches” not “Five sandwiches were eaten by Bill”].

• Do not repeat the title; in fact, don’t repeat—space is too precious.

The Manual also gives suggestions on other ways to save space. 

• Instruction on abbreviations is a bit oblique. Section 4.22 states, “In all circumstances other than in the reference list and in the abstract [italic added], you must decide whether (a) to spell it out a given expression every time it is used in an article or (b) to spell it out initially and abbreviate it thereafter.”  So presumably abbreviations should be used in abstracts as a matter of course. 

• Section 4.31(b) tells you to set numbers in the abstract as numerals.

Changes That Your Professor May Not Know About

Previous editions of the Publication Manual gave more extensive instructions on specifically how to keep the abstract brief.  This has led to a bit of a Catch-22, as in the sixth edition, in an effort to actually be brief, we removed some of those guidelines. We thus now have a gray area where the ghosts of old rules, still remembered by many a professor and editor, haunt the newer, less circumscribed instructions on keeping abstracts short and clear.

Here are some examples of ways in which guidelines about abstracts in the sixth edition differ from those given in the fifth edition:

• In previous editions, writers were instructed to include initials with the surnames of authors cited in the abstract. That instruction is now gone.

• Previously, the Manual included instructions stipulating use of the third person rather than first in the abstract (the opposite of the usual preference; see section 3.09). That specific instruction is gone, but the example given in the paragraph on being coherent and readable is written in the third person. Thus, presumably third person is still acceptable in the abstract but is not required.

• The whole instruction-rich section on being “self-contained” is gone. That section had included advice on defining abbreviations and unique terms and spelling out names of tests. Although those suggestions are still useful ways of saving space in an abstract, they are no longer specified in the Manual.

So be brief, be clear, and be prepared. 

The Proper Use of Et Al. in APA Style

 by Chelsea Lee

Academic writing is full of little conventions that may seem opaque to the uninitiated. One of these is the Latin phrase et al., an abbreviation meaning “and others.” It is used to shorten lists of author names in text citations to make repeated referencing shorter and simpler. Note that et al. is italicized in this post when I am using it as a linguistic example, but it should not be italicized when you are using it as part of a reference citation.

General Use of Et Al.

Below is a chart showing when to use et al., which is determined by the number of authors and whether it is the first time a reference has been cited in the paper. Specifically, articles with one or two authors include all names in every in-text citation; articles with three, four, or five authors include all names in the first in-text citation but are abbreviated to the first author name plus et al. upon subsequent citations; and articles with six or more authors are abbreviated to the first author name plus et al. for all in-text citations.

Number of authors	First text citation (either parenthetical or narrative)	Subsequent text citations (all)
One or two	Palmer & Roy, 2008	Palmer & Roy, 2008
Three, four, or five	Sharp, Aarons, Wittenberg, & Gittens, 2007	Sharp et al., 2007
Six or more	Mendelsohn et al., 2010	Mendelsohn et al., 2010

 

Avoiding Ambiguity

However, sometimes abbreviating to the first author name plus et al. can create ambiguity. Here are two example references, as also discussed in a previous post about reference twins.

Marewski, J. N., Gaissmaier, W., & Gigerenzer, G. (2010). Good judgments do not require complex cognition. Cognitive Processing, 11, 103–121. doi:10.1007/s10339-009-0337-0

Marewski, J. N., Gaissmaier, W., Schooler, L. J., Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (2010). From recognition to decisions: Extending and testing recognition-based models for multi-alternative inference. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 287–309. doi:10.3758/PBR.17.3.287

The first in-text citations to each of these would be as follows:

• (Marewski, Gaissmaier, & Gigerenzer, 2010)
• (Marewski, Gaissmaier, Schooler, Goldstein, & Gigerenzer, 2010)

For the subsequent in-text citations we would usually abbreviate these studies to the first author name plus et al.; however, doing so here would produce two Marewski et al. (2010) citations, leaving the reader unable to tell which one you mean (if the citations were from different years we would not have this problem, because the years would tell them apart). The solution here is to spell out as many names as necessary (here, to the third name) upon subsequent citations to tell the two apart: 

• (Marewski, Gaissmaier, & Gigerenzer, 2010)
• (Marewski, Gaissmaier, Schooler, et al., 2010)

Notice that for the first reference, this means that all citations to this source include all three names. For the second reference, the two remaining names can be abbreviated to et al.

A Quirk of Et Al.

Finally, be careful of a quirk of et al., which is that it is plural—that is, it must replace at least two names (or, put another way, it cannot stand for only one name). So, if you have worked through a reference and only one name is left to abbreviate, you must spell out all the names every time to tell the two apart.  Here is an example with three authors, although the principle holds no matter how many total authors there are:

Berry, C. J., Henson, R. N. A., & Shanks, D. R. (2006). On the relationship between repetition priming and recognition memory: Insights from a computational model. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 515–533. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.08.008

Berry, C. J., Shanks, D. R., & Henson, R. N. A. (2006). On the status of unconscious memory: Merikle and Reingold (1991) revisited. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 925–934. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.32.4.925

The correct in-text citations would be written as follows for all citations of these two references:

• (Berry, Henson, & Shanks, 2006)
• (Berry, Shanks, & Henson, 2006)

Avoid the following common incorrect ways of citing these references in text:

• (Berry, Henson, et al., 2006), (Berry et al., 2006a)
• (Berry, Shanks, et al., 2006), (Berry et al., 2006b)

A Final Note

If it happens that all the author names are exactly the same and the studies were published in the same year as well, the method of citation described in the reference twins post applies. Namely, use et al. as usual but also include lowercase letters after the year (2010a, 2010b, etc.) to tell the references apart.

For more information and examples on citing references in text, see Chapter 6 of our sixth edition Publication Manual (pp. 174–179). You may also be interested in our primer on how in-text citations work and our piece on common et al.-related errors.

How to Determine Whether a Periodical Is Paginated by Issue

 

by Tyler Krupa

 

Per APA Style, when formatting periodical references (which include journals, magazines, and newsletters), include the issue number (immediately following the volume number in parentheses) when the periodical is paginated by issue (i.e., begins each issue with page 1). Otherwise, include only the volume number (see p. 198 of the 6th edition of the APA Publication Manual).

Therefore, in the journal article reference listed below, note that both the volume number and the issue number are included because the E-Journal of Applied Psychology is paginated by issue:

Sillick, T. J., & Schutte, N. S. (2006). Emotional intelligence and self-esteem mediate between perceived early parental love and adult happiness. E-Journal of Applied Psychology, 2(2), 38–48. Retrieved from http://ojs.lib.swin.edu.au/index.php/ejap

Although it is rare for journals to be paginated by issue (note that all APA journals use continuous pagination), sometimes determining whether a periodical is paginated by issue is not clear. In these instances, there are two steps that you can follow to determine the pagination:

1. Compare the page range and issue number of the article. If you see that the issue number is 2 or more and the page range of your article is low, chances are that the periodical is paginated by issue, as the second and subsequent issues of a volume should contain higher page ranges if the pages of the volume are numbered continuously. In the Sillick and Schutte (2006) example above, the article is contained in the second issue but has a low page range (38–48), which should tip you off that this journal is paginated by issue. Likewise, if the issue number is 2 or more and the page range of the article is high, chances are that the periodical is not paginated by issue, as a periodical that begins each issue on page 1 should not contain articles that have high page ranges.

In instances in which you still cannot determine whether a periodical is paginated by issue by following this step (e.g., when the article is contained in the first issue of a volume or when the page range is not high or low enough for you to definitively make a decision), then completing the next step will get your answer.

2. Go to the periodical’s home page on the Internet and check the table of contents (TOC) of past issues. At a periodical’s home page, you should be able to compare the TOCs of issues within a volume and determine whether each issue begins at page 1. If you find that each issue of a volume begins on page 1, include the issue number in parentheses after the volume number in your reference. If the page numbers of issues within a volume are numbered continuously, include only the volume number in your reference.

We hope this explanation helps to clear up any confusion regarding when to include an issue number when formatting periodical references. If not, feel free to leave a comment.

Citing a Test Database

 

 By Anne Breitenbach

Some time ago, we had a post that explained how to find a DOI and provided a brief YouTube video of the process. We asked at the time for requests for tutorials about APA Style that could be useful. In response to that request, we were asked to create tutorials to explain how to cite content from two new databases APA is launching in September. The first of these, PsycTESTS, is a research database that provides descriptive and administrative information about tests, as well as access to some psychological tests, measures, scales, and other assessments. PsycTESTS is interesting in that it’s an example of citing the record itself, available only from a unique database, and not the test or supporting literature.

Take a look: