Many papers and praxes written at YSN must follow the standards described in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fifth Edition, published by the American Psychological Association. A copy of the manual is available in the Reference Room librarian's office and a copy is available in the Medical Library Reference section (Ref 20 BF76.7 P83 2001).

APA Guides

The following guides offer synopses of important APA rules. All of these sites reflect the APA 5th edition rules.

• APA Style Electronic References
• APA Style Selected Examples (University of South Dakota I.D. Weeks Library)
• APA Headings (University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center)
• APA Style (University of Minnesota Crookston)
• APA Guide (Purdue University Online Writing Lab)

Endnote/RefWorks

You may find that Endnote or RefWorks will be very helpful to you in writing your praxis. Either of these citation managers will help you organize your references, and it will automatically create an APA style list of references. The Library maintains a site with Endnote/RefWorks help. The library regularly schedules Endnote and RefWorks classes, or you may contact a librarian to arrange a one-on-one Endnote or RefWorks session.

Examples of in-text citations (refer to the APA Manual pp. 207-214)

APA style dictates author, year within parentheses. However, if the author and or year is used within the sentence that element must be omitted from the parentheses. (If you use Endnote or RefWorks there are ways to configure your citation to do this.)

A single author
Smith (2001) found … OR
In her 2001 study, Smith found …
In a recent study (Smith, 2001) …

Two authors
Smith and Wilson (2002) described …
…as has been described (Johnson & Grieg, 2000)

Three to five authors
First occurrence in text …
Simpson, Flanders, Burns, Wiggums and Skinner (1999) compared
Each subsequent reference to the same work
Simpson et al. (1999)
Simpson et al. found (for subsequent references in the same paragraph omit the year)

Six or more authors
First and all subsequent occurrences
Rogers et al. (1998) tested …
(Note that in the Reference List up to six authors are spelled out, and the seventh and all subsequent authors are replaced by et al.)

Personal communication (may be phone, email, personal interviews…)
J. G. Glover (personal communication, August 26, 2003)
Note: personal communications are NOT included in the Reference List.

Reference List Examples

Journal article with up to six authors

Journal article with seven or more authors

Note: Include issue if and only if each issue begins with page 1.

Journal online only (no PDF, no page numbers)

Book

Chapter in a book

Web site

Citing Electronic Resources

Many people have questions about how to cite material that they have accessed electronically. Examples for citing electronic resources are given on the APA electronic references Web site.

Here are the ways that you would cite these articles:

Articles based on a print source that you have found in the electronic version of the journal

At present, the majority of the articles retrieved from online publications in psychology and the behavioral sciences are exact duplicates of those in their print versions and are unlikely to have additional analyses and data attached. The same basic primary journal reference can be used, but if you have viewed the article only in its electronic form, you should add in brackets after the article title "Electronic version" as in the following example:

Ellett ML. Croffie JM. Cohen MD. Perkins SM. (2005) Gastric tube placement in young children. [Electronic version] Clinical Nursing Research. 14(3):238-52, 2005 Aug.

Journal articles that you have searched for in a database, and viewed and retrieved via that database

When referencing material obtained by searching an aggregated database (e.g. MEDLINE. CINAHL, PsycINFO), follow the format appropriate to the work retrieved and add a retrieval statement that gives the date of retrieval and the name of the database.