APA Style

About Style Guides

A style guide is a set of rules for publications, including research papers. It guides writers and editors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, word usage, formatting, and citation creation. It ensures consistency and clarity in writing across an industry, company or project. 

Which Style Should I Use?

There are many different style guides. Lincoln University recommends students use APA Style unless a professor instructs you otherwise. 

APA Style

APA Style was created by the American Psychological Association. APA Style provides guidelines for academic papers regardless of subject or discipline. However, traditionally APA is most frequently used by writers and students in:

• Social Sciences, such as Psychology, Linguistics, Sociology, Economics, and Criminology
• Business
• Nursing

Plagiarism is using the work or ideas of others without including adequate acknowledgement of its source, making it seem as if it's your own. It is a form of fraud. Plagiarism can take many forms, from deliberate cheating to accidentally copying from a source without acknowledgement.

Consequently, whenever you use the words or ideas of another person in your work, you MUST acknowledge where they came from. Your professors want to distinguish between the building block ideas borrowed from other people and your own perspectives or conclusions. You make these distinctions clear by citing your sources. 

Some examples of plagiarism:

• a sequence of words from another source without quotation marks
• a paraphrased passage without acknowledgment of the source
• the use of work or ideas created by others as though it were one’s own

The main reason for citing sources is to give credit to the authors whose ideas you have used in your research paper. Citing your sources also allows readers of your work to build on your research by finding the sources to which you’ve referred. Finally, if you don’t ethically cite the sources upon which your research is based, you may be guilty of Plagiarism.

Citations are required both when paraphrasing (summarizing in your own words) or quoting (copying word-for-word). APA Style asks for brief "in-text citations" throughout your paper AND more detailed citations of all sources you used in the "References" list at the end of your paper. 

There are two ways to integrate others' research into your assignment: you can paraphrase or you can quote. Citations are required for both.

Paraphrasing is used to show that you understand what the author wrote. You must reword the passage, expressing the ideas in your own words, and not just change a few words here and there. Make sure to also include an in-text citation.

Quoting is copying a selection from someone else's work, phrasing it exactly it was originally written. When quoting place quotation marks (" ") around the selected passage to show where the quote begins and where it ends. Make sure to include an in-text citation.

In APA, in-text citations are inserted in the body of your research paper to briefly document the source of your information. Brief in-text citations point the reader to more complete information in the reference list at the end of the paper.

• In-text citations include the last name of the author followed by a comma and the publication year enclosed in parentheses: (Shrestha, 2018).

• If you are quoting directly the page number should be included, if given. If you are paraphrasing the page number is not required.

• If the author's name is not given, then use the first word or words of the title: (Using Citations, 2018).

Signal Phrase

If you refer to the author's name in a sentence you do not have to include the name again as part of your in-text citation. Instead include the date after the name and the page number (if there is one) at the end of the quotation or paraphrased section. For example:

According to Wang (2003), "students often had difficulty using APA style, especially when it was their first time" (p. 199).

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. Here are some quick rules for creating your Reference list.

1. Start a new page for your reference list. Center the title, References, at the top of the page.
2. Double-space the list.
3. Start the first line of each reference at the left margin; indent each subsequent line five spaces (a hanging indentation).
4. Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the reference. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
5. For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first (and middle, if listed) initials followed by periods.
6. Italicize the titles of these works: books, audiovisual material, internet documents and newspapers, and the title and volume number of journals and magazines.
7. Do not italicize titles of most parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document.
8. In titles of non-periodicals (books, videotapes, websites, reports, poems, essays, chapters, etc), capitalize only the first letter of the first word of a title and subtitle, and all proper nouns (names of people, places, organizations, nationalities).
9. If a web source (not from the library) is not a stable archived version, or you are unsure whether it is stable, include a statement of the accessed date before the link.