Writing issues: References

We recently examined citations; let's now take a look at references. First a few reminders: Everything I am talking about today is in the APA Manual- see chapter 7. All references cited in text must appear in the reference section of the paper. All references listed must have a citation in the text. An easy way to check this is to print out your reference list and cross off each one as you read the paper (this is what I will do as your reader). 

Journals (periodicals)

Include the digital object identifier (DOI) in the reference if one is assigned.  

If no DOI is assigned and you retrieved the article online, include the page URL for the journal, newsletter, or magazine in the reference (no retrieval data is needed). Use this format: Retrieved from http:// www.xxxxxxx 

Here is an example of an article with a DOI

Lamb, J. K. (2013). Pencil panic. Health Psychology, 23, 225-227. doi: 10.1037/0278-6133.24.2.224 

Tricky aspect: If an article has more than 7 authors, list the first 6 and last one.

Smyth, J. R., Karl, J. T., Stuart, F. W., Loring, B. R., Miller, W. R., Richards, Y. C. … Bosko, P. (2012). An examination of pencil addicts. Pencil Discovery, 4, 112-116. doi: 10.1037/0278-6133.22.2.224. 

Books

For an entire book, you would use:

James, K. L. (2012). Pencils and psychology. NY: Sage. (Note- only first word of title is capitalized) 

For a chapter in a book:

Lassie, D. G. & Jones, C. T. (2012). My fear of pencils. In K. L. James (Ed.), Pencils and psychology (pp. 20-46). NY: Sage 

Check your APA Manual for specifics of different types of references, they have many examples. 

A lesson in Word formatting. You do not need to press the enter key and indent the second line of each references. A better way, which maintains the spacing even with changes in the paper, is to use "hanging indent." I will explain how to do this using Word 2010, if you have a different version look up "hanging indents" in your help menu. 

Highlight the text you want to apply this to, go to Home/ Paragraph/ Special/ Hanging indent. Magically, they will be correctly formatted. 

Next time, we will take a look at student realizations Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Send me an email with your ideas. leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu