The American Psychological Association created this style of writing and was originally meant as a set of rules for authors who were publishing articles and scholarly works in their journals. It was established in 1929 and has been used ever since then to help research writers write in the established standard form of language, citation and to avoid plagiarism.
The guidelines are a valuable tool for writing such things as lab reports, scientific papers and writing for the social sciences, such as psychology and education. The APA bibliography format tells you how to write out the references you use, including those that you only read for background information. However, the guidelines focus on the whole of writing the paper, such as direct quotes, endnotes, in-text citations, and footnotes. It also allows you, the writer, to use the past tense when writing instead of the present tense.
Some Standards To Note
Remember that bibliographies are just one small part of the project as a whole. You’ll be writing the entire report, from start to finish, using the guidelines set forth by the American Psychological Association.
Everything on the works cited page will be arranged in alphabetical order, beginning with the author’s last name, first initial and middle initials if necessary. If there is no author name, you will start with the title of the publication, still incorporating it using alphabetical order.
Periodical titles are italicized, and all the important words are capitalized, though book titles are capitalized using a sentence style approach, meaning the first word is capitalized, as well as proper nouns, while everything else is lowercase.
The entire report will be double-spaced, including the works cited page and in-text citations will come after the cited work in parentheses. The author’s last name is first, followed by a comma and then the year of publication followed by a period. The page number is also included, with a “p.” or a “pp.”
Footnotes and endnotes can be used sparingly for information that is considered non-crucial to the piece at large.
You’ll have a running header on all the pages, which should include page numbers and a short title of the work, which is usually cut to three words and will be placed on the right-hand side of each page.
The APA bibliography format may seem confusing at first, and can seem that way throughout your college career. Some people never fully understand how to do the formatting, but there is another option. Visit WorksCited 4u today to find out how to generate entries for free.
