Understanding the Basic Concepts about APA Citation Style Guide: An Article for Beginners

What does citation mean?

Citation means citing your sources in your research so that other researchers find the materials that you utilized in your research. Citing your sources also means avoiding plagiarism. The authors name, date, location of the publishing company, journal title, or DOI (Digital Object Identifier) are the common elements in a citation (University of Pittsburg, 2015, para. 2).

How about a citation style? What does it mean?

A citation style is a guide for the formatting and organization of information in your research which includes in text citation and bibliography format (Temple University, 2017, para. 1).

What are the different citation styles to choose from?

There are three major citation styles:
• Chicago (or Turabian), used in many fields
• MLA, used in the humanities
• APA, used in social sciences, education, and business (Lipson, 2011, p. 6).

What else are other citation styles?

✘ CSE for the biological sciences
✘ AMA for the biomedical sciences, medicine, nursing, and dentistry
✘ ACS for chemistry
✘ AIP for mathematics and computer sciences
✘ IEEE and ASCE for engineering (Lipson, 2011, p. 6).

Which one should you choose?

“The one you choose depends on your field, your professor’s advice if you are a student, and your own preferences (Lipson, 2011, p. 6).

What is APA?

✘ stands for American Psychological Association.
✘ Contains style rules such as rules for in text citation and referencing, writing style rules, mechanics in writing, proper use of labels, tables and figures which are codified for scientific writing for the ease of reading comprehension (American Psychological Association, 2010).

What are the two types of Citation in APA?

1. In Text or Parenthetical Citations – locates the source you used at a specific point in the paper.
2. Reference List – lists all the sources that you used at the end of your paper. (NOVA, 2017)

Example: Say your topic is code-switching in written texts. You found a paragraph that you want to include in your paper such as the one below:

“a considerable amount of research has been done on code-switching in oral discourse, but little research has been conducted on written discourse. Thus, written code-switching is still at an embryonic stage”.

The paragraph above is from the article written by Montes-Alcalä in the year 2001. How should you cite this?

You should do it this way:

Montes-Alcalá (2001) states that the phenomenon of code-switching has been extensively studied, however most of the studies done on code-switching are in oral production and few on written production of bilingual communities.

The above-example is what you call in text citation. That is how you cite the paragraph in your text. You mention first the author’s last name then put the year in parenthesis.

Another way to do it is like this:

The phenomenon of code-switching has been extensively studied, however most of the studies done on code-switching are in oral production and few on written production of bilingual communities (Montes-Alcalá, 2001).

In the example I gave above, you just put the author and the year which are separated by a comma in parenthesis.

How do you do the referencing for the example? In other words, how do you put the source?

Just type the word References at the end of your paper and follow the referencing style given in APA (2010). The style is different for books, journals, online sources, and other materials.

This is an example:

Reference

Montes-Alcalä, C. (2001). Written codeswitching: Powerful bilingual images. In R. Jacobson (Ed.). Codeswitching worldwide II: Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs (pp.193-222). New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter.

Aside from in text citation and referencing, other very important contents of APA (2010) or the 6th edition which is the latest one, are discussion on ethics of research, writing style, mechanics (punctuation) grammar (agreement of subject and verb), sensitivity to labels, and rules on tables and figures formatting.

In a nutshell, before you write your research, make sure that you refer to a citation style guide such as APA while doing every part of your paper, from formatting to conducting the systematic steps and procedures to writing the final paper.

I hope I was able to help you understand the basics of APA.

References

American Psychological Association (6th ed.). (2010). Publication Manual of the American Pyschological Association. Washington, DC: Author.

Lipson, C. (2011). Cite right: A quick guide to citation styles – MLA, APA, Chicago, the sciences, professions, and more. (2nd ed.). USA: University of Chicago Press.

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA). (2017). Using sources: Evaluating sources and avoiding plagiarism: Two types of citation. Retrieved from http://libguides.nvcc.edu/ c.php?g=361391&p=2440254

University of Pittsburg. (2015). Citation Styles: APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, IEEE: Home. Retrieved from http://pitt. libguides. com/ citationhelp

Temple University. (2017). Citing Sources: What is a citation style? Retrieved fromhttp://guides.temple.edu/c.php?g=78108 &p=507525