How to Cite the UpToDate Database in APA Style

 by Chelsea Lee

The UpToDate database contains peer-reviewed medical articles that are periodically updated by experts in the field; as such, it is a popular source for writers to cite in APA Style.

Cite an article from UpToDate like you would an entry in an online reference work or chapter in an edited book. Here is an example citation:

Williams, J., & Nieuwsma, J. (2016). Screening for depression in adults. In J. A. Melin (Ed.), UpToDate. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from https://www.uptodate.com/contents/screening-for-depression-in-adults

• In text: (Williams & Nieuwsma, 2016).

Here are some notes about the components of the reference:

• Use the authors of the article as the authors in the reference.
• For the year in the reference, use the year listed after “this topic last updated.”
• For the title, use the title of the article.
• Use the name of the deputy editor(s) for the article as the editor(s) of the reference work. Section editors do not need to be listed in the reference.
• Write UpToDate in italics as the name of the reference work.
• Provide a retrieval date because the content will change over time.
• Provide a URL for retrieval of the article.

 Do you have additional questions about citing the UpToDate database? Leave a comment below.

And In Other Research News: Student Research Webinars From APA and Psi Chi

By Anne Breitenbach

You know, APA Style Experts don’t spend their whole lives in a glamorous ivory tower, as you no doubt imagine of people who spend their days with a pointy green pencil, a heap of style manuals, and a set of bookmarks to some of the Internet’s most enticing grammar sites. No, sometimes we step out from our secret blog and Twitter identities to talk to people directly. Well, almost. We come a step closer and talk anyway—via webinar.  It may also surprise you to know that we have other professional research interests in addition to APA Style.  Today, the Style blog has graciously yielded the floor to me to talk about one of those other initiatives that we thought some of you might find useful.

In 2014 APA introduced a new student training feature. We hosted a series of webinars jointly with Psi Chi. We conducted four session last year led by Psi Chi graduate students and staff from various departments of APA. Each of the webinars was also recorded and is now available on YouTube.

Here is information about each of those sessions and a YouTube link and direct access for each:

Psi Chi-APA Training: Tests and Measures, April 2, 2014

Psi Chi’s Lesther Papa, a Utah State University doctoral student, discussed his process for evaluating, adapting, and creating tests. APA PsycINFO trainer Anne Breitenbach explored how the PsycINFO and PsycTESTS databases can help researchers with those tasks.

http://bit.ly/pschi_test

Psi Chi-APA Training: Statistics for Student Publication, June 5, 2014

Psi Chi’s Lesther Papa shared tips on determining what test to use and covered a number of statistical concepts.  APA Books Product Development Supervisor Chelsea Lee continued the discussion with APA Style guidelines on statistical presentation in text, tables, and figures.

http://bit.ly/1pgnSKF

Psi Chi APA Training: Theory to Practice, September 29, 2014

Psi Chi’s Spencer Richards, a doctoral candidate in Clinical/Counseling/School psychology at Utah State University, discussed how important his relevant work experience was to his commitment to the discipline--and to getting into graduate school! PsycINFO’s Anne Breitenbach demonstrated how the PsycTHERAPY database can help bring realism into the classroom.

http://bit.ly/1udgXqz

Psi Chi APA:  How to Publish While a Student, December 11, 2014

Psi Chi members—and published authors—Rachel Cook of Arizona State University and Liz Brown of Duquesne University discussed the steps to publication and its advantages. APA Journals Editorial Coordinator Sharon Ramos provided pointers from the publisher’s side.

http://bit.ly/1tJPgT1

Please feel free to share these with others via your own websites and blogs or Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or old-fashioned email!

How to Cite a Hashtag in #APAStyle

by Timothy McAdoo

Note: To learn how to cite individual tweets or posts that include hashtags, see our post on citing social media. This post is about how to talk about the hashtags themselves.

The hashtag as an organizational tool wasn’t born on Twitter, but that's where I, and many others, first saw it used that way. And, as Chris Messina, who introduced the idea to Twitter, has said, "it's left nerd-dom and now it's out there in the world." Indeed, the hashtag is a common sight on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Google+, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest, Kickstarter, and other platforms. And its ubiquity makes the hashtag an incredibly useful search tool.

#APAStyle on Facebook
#APAStyle on Twitter
#APAStyle on Pinterest
#APAStyle on Google+

So how do you cite a hashtag? This may surprise you: You don’t!

That’s because, just like a search of a research database, finding and searching with the right hashtag is part of your research methodology. And just as with other aspects of your methodology, you can simply describe it the text of your paper.

That is, just as you might say “I searched the Public Affairs Information Service International database for Hong Kong, electoral system, and Umbrella Revolution,” you might also say “I searched Twitter, Vine, and Instragram for the hashtags #UmbrellaRevolution, #OccupyHK, and #HongKong that appeared between September 22, 2014 through October 22, 2014.” Interested readers and fellow researchers can then attempt to replicate the search if they are so inclined. If the reasoning behind the wording of the hashtag is not obvious, you might want to elaborate. In this example, you might want or need to explain the origin of the terms Umbrella Revolution and the Occupy movement, which led to the #UmbrellaRevolution and #OccupyHK hashtags.

Of course, in your paper you might also refer to individual tweets, Facebook posts, pictures, or other online items that include hashtags. For instance, you might want to quote the most popular Tweet that used the hashtag or just show some representative cases. You can (and should) create references and cite tweets or other online posts that you’ve quoted, paraphrased, or otherwise relied on in a paper.

How to Cite a Psychological Test in APA Style

by Timothy McAdoo

A reference to a psychological test (also called a measure, scale, survey, quiz, or instrument) follows the usual who-when-what-where format.

References

Here’s an example of a test you might have retrieved directly from a website:

Purring, A. (2012). Charisma and Tenacity Survey [Measurement instrument].      Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/tests/measures/instruments/surveys      /charisma.html

A test's name is a proper noun, so be sure to capitalize it in the reference.

In other cases, you may actually be citing the database record rather than the test. If you found a record for the test in a database, you can cite it, whether or not the record contains a link to the test itself:

Barks, H., & Howls, I. (2013). Directions of Generosity [Database record].      Retrieved from The McAdoo Database of Fictional Titles. http://dx.doi.org      /62.2366/34-28.466

Or, perhaps you’ve used a test that is not available online. Not to worry, the format varies only in the "where" element. Use the first example above as your template, but replace “Retrieved from http://...” with the location and publisher (e.g., Petland, MD: E & K Press).

Using Acronyms

Although some tests are better known by their acronyms than by their full titles, the acronym is not included in the reference.* Rather, introduce the acronym at the first use in the body of the paper, as shown in the examples below.

In-Text Citations

In the body of your paper, be careful to write the name exactly as it appears in your reference. And here again, capitalize the test name, because it is a proper noun. However, capitalize the word survey (or instrument, quiz, etc.) only if it’s part of the test’s name:

“In this study, we used Purring’s (2012) Charisma and Tenacity Survey (CATS) rather than Barks and Howls’s (2013) Directions of Generosity survey.”

The abbreviation need not be introduced if the test name is mentioned only once. However, if the test name appears frequently in the paper (i.e., generally three or more times), define it the first time, and use the abbreviation consistently thereafter. Note also that the test names are not italicized when used in the text. 

Finally, although you don’t need to include the author and date every time you mention the test by name, do include the author–date citation if you quote directly from the test or paraphrase it in any way.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve passed my test! Give yourself an A+.

____

*The exception is the rare case where the acronym is the only official name of the test (i.e., an official spelled-out title no longer exists, which is an uncommon occurrence; the most famous example is the SAT, which no longer has a spelled-out name).

How to Cite Cochrane Reviews in APA Style

by Jeff Hume-Pratuch

Dear Style Experts,

How should I format a reference for an article from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews? I have the names of the authors, the date and the title of the topic; however, there is no journal as such. Do I use "retrieved from" with the URL, or should I include the DOI?

--Anonymous

Dear A.,

The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews consists of original material written by members of the Cochrane Collaboration. Its articles may be published in database form, but it functions like an online journal: Numbered issues are published 12 times a year, and each article has its own DOI. Therefore, we can modify the journal article format to fit a Cochrane Review, as follows:

Singh, J., Kour, K., & Jayaram Mahesh, B. (2012). Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors for schizophrenia. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2012(1), 1–101. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD007967.pub2

Note that the year of publication does double duty as the volume number. The issue number is needed because the journal is not continuously paginated. And because we have a DOI, neither the URL nor the Cochrane-assigned ID number is needed.

Hope this helps,
--Jeff

 

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?
 

 

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:

 

Beneficial Supplements

by Stefanie

You have written your manuscript for an APA journal (or another scholarly publication), and now you are looking at all of your fantastic supporting materials and deciding what to include. There’s a color figure that rivals the rainbow in beauty and precision, perfectly illustrating your points but beyond your shoestring budget to include in the print publication. There’s a huge table, filled with insightful calculations that you did not quite get a chance to cover in the text but that is valuable nonetheless. You would love to share the digitized video and music clips used in the study. Not to mention that the raw data your experiment generated is truly a gold mine. Can you include all of these materials with your article?

In the past, the answer might have been no, given technological limits and concerns about space and the cost of printing color figures. But now all of these resources and more can be posted online as supplemental material for your article! Once published, the print version of your article will include a URL on the first page and the online version of your article will have a live link, both taking readers to a landing page that presents the cache of data treasure you have provided (see a sample landing page here).

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, sixth edition, notes that “web-based, online supplemental archives tend to be more appropriate for material that is more useful when available as a direct download as well materials that are not easily presented in standard print format” (p. 39). Examples of such materials, in addition to the ones mentioned above, are lengthy computer code, mathematical or computational models, detailed intervention protocols, and expanded methodology sections.

Supplemental materials are usually subject to peer review and should be included with journal submissions. Each document should have a title and a context statement specifying what is in it, and the electronic files should follow a consistent naming convention (e.g., ABN.Smith20100001.doc, ABN.Smith20100001.wav, ABN.Smith20100001.jpeg). APA journals practice is to post accepted supplemental materials without further editing or polishing; the procedures of other publishers may vary.

The Publication Manual notes that supplemental materials should be included “only if they help readers to understand, evaluate, or replicate the study or theoretical argument being made” (p. 40). Also keep in mind that supplemental materials are subject to all relevant ethical standards; be especially aware of permissions issues when reprinting images of human participants or any formerly published materials.

Information on acceptable file formats for APA journals supplemental materials may be found here. For more information on this topic, please see the Publication Manual, pp. 39–40 and 230.

How to Find a DOI

by Timothy McAdoo

Ever had trouble finding a DOI? In the video below, we demonstrate how to find a DOI in a variety of ways: from an article’s record in APA PsycINFO (on a number of vendor platforms), from an article itself (hard copy version or electronic), or from CrossRef’s Simple Text Query form.

We hope this visual demonstration is helpful. Are there other tutorials about APA Style that you’d like to see? Let us know!

P.S. For more detailed background information on DOIs, see Chelsea’s recent DOI primer. And for information about using DOIs and URLs in your references, don’t miss the DOI and URL flowchart!

Edit: The original DOI video has been replaced with an updated (March 30, 2016) version. A larger version of this tutorial, with a navigation menu option, is available here.