APA style

Style Guides

ACS Style Guide AMA Manual of Style The Associated Press Stylebook The Chicago Manual of Style Turabian The Elements of Style The Elements of Typographic Style ISO 690 MHRA Style Guide MLA Handbook MLA Style Manual The New York Times Manual The Oxford Guide to Style/New Hart's Rules The Publication Manual of the APA The ASA Style Guide

American Psychological Association (APA) Style is a set of rules that authors use when submitting papers for publications in APA journals. The APA states that they were developed to assist reading comprehension in the social and behavioral sciences, for clarity of communication, and to "move the idea forward with a minimum of distraction and a maximum of precision." The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association contains guidelines for every aspect of writing, especially in the social sciences, from determining authorship to constructing a table to avoiding plagiarism and constructing accurate reference citations.

Early editions

The Publication Manual was established in 1929 as a seven-page document with a set of procedures to increase the ease of reading comprehension (APA, 2009a, p. xiii). Created under the sponsorship of the United States National Research Council, its originators included psychologists, anthropologists, and publishing professionals.

In 1952, the booklet was expanded and published as a 55-page supplement in Psychological Bulletin with revisions made in 1957 and 1967 (APA, 1952, 1957, 1967). The first edition covered word choice, grammar, punctuation, formatting, journal publication policies, and "wrapping and shipping" (APA, Council of Editors, 1952, p. 442).

In response to the growing complexities of scientific reporting, subsequent editions were released in 1974, 1983, 1994, and 2001. Primarily known for the simplicity of its reference citation style, the Publication Manual also established standards for language use that had far-reaching effects. Particularly influential were the "Guidelines for Nonsexist Language in APA Journals," first published as a modification to the 1974 edition, which provided practical alternatives to sexist language then in common usage. The guidelines for reducing bias in language have been updated over the years and presently provide practical guidance for writing about race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, and disability status (APA, 2009, pp. 70–77; see also APA, 2009b).

Sixth Edition of the Publication Manual

The sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association was released in July 2009 after 4 years of development. The Publication Manual Revision Task Force of the American Psychological Association established parameters for the revision based on published criticism, user comments, commissioned reviews, and input from psychologists, nurses, librarians, business leaders, publishing professionals, and APA governance groups (APA, 2007a, 2007b). To accomplish these revisions, the Task Force appointed working groups of four to nine members in seven areas: Bias-Free Language, Ethics, Graphics, Journal Article Reporting Standards, References, Statistics, and Writing Style (APA, 2009, pp. xvii-xviii).

Thoroughly reorganized and updated, the sixth edition was significantly revised to incorporate the technological advances that had affected virtually all areas of scientific communication since the previous edition was published (APA, 2001). Specific revisions in the sixth edition include

• expanded ethics guidance on determining authorship, sharing data, plagiarism, and self-plagiarism;
• a new section on Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS), stressing the need for precision and consistency in reporting methodology and providing practical guidelines for achieving this consistency;
• new, simplified heading style for easier comprehension of online articles;
• expanded guidelines on reducing bias in language, including a new section on presenting historical language that is inappropriate by present standards;
• new guidelines for reporting inferential statistics as well as thoroughly revised and expanded tables of statistical abbreviations and measures;
• new procedures and examples for the electronic presentation of data;
• new formats for electronic references, with a focus on the digital object identifier, or DOI, as the most reliable way to locate online information;
• expanded information about the publishing process, including a new discussion of the peer review process;
• all new examples and illustrative material to demonstrate revised standards of style.

Errors in the First Printing of the Sixth Edition

Despite multiple reviews of the manuscript at the copyediting and proofreading stages by senior editors, staff realized shortly after the manual had gone to press that the sample papers contained errors. They took prompt action to correct the errors and to post the fully corrected papers on the APA Style website where they were made available for viewing and downloading. Staff concurrently examined the rest of the manuscript and found the following additional errors:

• In 188 style guidelines, two errors were made, and one of these was a punctuation error.
• In almost 1,000 examples provided to illustrate those rules, 36 errors were made (roughly half of these occurred in the sample papers, which were subsequently corrected and posted online). Another 10 occurred in the 374 examples that were provided in the reference chapter.
• Five clarifications to text were made. These were not errors but rather clarified and expanded text, for example, adding a second example for both a blog post and a blog comment.
• Three pages of nonsignificant typographical errors were corrected. These included such things as changing an em dash to an en dash, changing a minus sign to a hyphen, and correcting for added space that was automatically added when a sample form was reproduced.

In the interest of transparency (and following the same procedure that was followed for the fifth edition), staff posted all of the corrections online in a single document on October 1, 2009, and shortly thereafter alerted users to the existence of the corrections in a blog entry. On the same day the corrections were posted, an individual posting to the Educational and Behavioral Sciences Section listserv (EBBSS-L) of the American Library Association alerted readers to what she described as the "many" errors in the first printing and speculated that "some but not all" would be corrected in a second printing. On October 5, 2009, APA staff responded to the note clarifying that errors were found in the sample papers, that the papers had been corrected and posted online, that the substantive guidance in the manual was correct and accurate as printed, and that a full list of corrections could be found at the APA Style website.

On October 13, 2009, the article "Correcting a Style Guide" was published in the online newspaper Inside Higher Education that included interviews with several individuals who defined the errors as "egregious" (Epstein, 2009). The article, along with rumors spread on various listervs, resulted in exaggerated accounts of both the magnitude and the extent of the errors, with some reports on Amazon.com claiming more than 80 pages of errors had occurred.

APA responded to the increasing confusion by issuing an apology and implementing a return/replacement program for purchasers who wished to exchange their first printing copies for second printing copies of the Publication Manual. The first edition copies returned to APA were destroyed. The second and all subsequent printings of the Publication Manual have been fully corrected.

See also

• Citation
• Comparison of reference management software

References

• American Psychological Association. (2010). The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. ISBN 9781433805622
• American Psychological Association. (2001). The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. ISBN 9781557987914

External links

• Introduction to APA Style - Hypertextual electronic workshop hosted by the Online Writing Lab (OWL), Department of English, Purdue University.
• APA Style—Reference List/In-Text (pdf)
• Create References APA - Free Generator APA references
• APA "Citation Styles" Online Guide - Resource hosted by the Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Apacite – "A BibTeX style which closely follows American Psychological Association style citations, providing a very good match."
• APA.cls – Resource compiled by Athanassios Protopapas, Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP), Athens, Greece.
• APA Guide Basics Summary (pdf) - Webpage summary of APA Rules.
• APA Style - APA Style Online home page.
• APA Reference Generator - Harvard and APA style citation generator
• CiteFast - Free Citation Generator
• "Citation Machine" – Citation style generator (APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian).
• "KnightCite: A Project of Hekman Library – APA, MLA, and Chicago Style citation generator hosted by Calvin College.
• "NoodleBib Express" – Style advice, citation creator (APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian).
• Psychology with Style: A Hypertext Writing Guide (for the 5th edition of the APA Manual) (February 1, 2007 - Version 5.014). - Teacher's Guide compiled by Mark Plonsky, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point.