CHAPTER 9

CITATION AND STYLE

MECHANICS

Objectives:

After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• To learn the important purposes of citation

• to allow the reader to determine independently whether
the referenced material supports the author's argument
in the claimed way
• Define APA style and list several of its most important
characteristics.
• Identify three levels of APA style and give examples of
each.
• Identify multiple sources of information about APA style.

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Citation

• is a reference to a source.
• is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an
intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section
of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of
others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.
• Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic
entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas
bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-
readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nonpublication,
a form of micro attribution.
• have several important purposes: to uphold intellectual honesty (or
avoiding plagiarism), to attribute prior or unoriginal work and ideas to the
correct sources, to allow the reader to determine independently whether the
referenced material supports the author's argument in the claimed way, and to
help the reader gauge the strength and validity of the material the author has
used.
• The forms of citations generally subscribe to one of the generally accepted
citations systems, such as the Oxford, Harvard, MLA, American Sociological
Association (ASA), American Psychological Association (APA), and other
citations systems, because their syntactic conventions are widely known and
easily interpreted by readers. Each of these citation systems has its advantages
and disadvantages. Editors often specify the citation system to use.

Bibliographic Citation

• is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item. Citations

should supply detail to identify the item uniquely.[7] Different citation systems
and styles are used in scientific citation, legal citation, prior art, the arts, and
the humanities.

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Unique Identifiers

• Along with information such as author(s), date of publication, title and page
numbers, citations may also include unique identifiers depending on the type
of work being referred to.

Citations of books may include an International Standard Book Number (ISBN).

Specific volumes, articles or other identifiable parts of a periodical may have an

associated Serial Item and Contribution Identifier (SICI) or an International Standard
Serial Number (ISSN).
Electronic documents may have a digital object identifier (DOI).
Biomedical research articles may have a PubMed Identifier (PMID).

Vancouver system

• uses sequential numbers in the text, either bracketed or superscript or

both.The numbers refer to either footnotes (notes at the end of the page) or
endnotes (notes on a page at the end of the paper) that provide source detail.
• The notes system may or may not require a full bibliography, depending on
whether the writer has used a full-note form or a shortened-note form.

Parenthetical referencing
• also known as Harvard referencing, has full or partial, in-text, citations
enclosed in circular brackets and embedded in the paragraph.

Superscripted numbers

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 • are inserted at the point of reference, just as in the citation‐sequence system,
but the citations are numbered according to the order of cited works at the
end of the paper or book; this list is often sorted alphabetically by author.

Law

• The Bluebook is a citation system traditionally used in American academic

legal writing, and the Bluebook (or similar systems derived from it) are used
by many courts. At present, academic legal articles are always footnoted, but
motions submitted to courts and court opinions traditionally use inline
citations, which are either separate sentences or separate clauses. Inline
citations allow readers to quickly determine the strength of a source based
on, for example, the court a case was decided in and the year it was decided.
• The legal citation style used almost universally in Canada is based on
the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation (AKA McGill Guide), published
by McGill Law Journal.

British legal citation almost universally follows the Oxford Standard for Citation of
Legal Authorities (OSCOLA).

APA Style

APA style is a set of guidelines for writing in psychology and related fields. These
guidelines are set down in
the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2006).

• The Publication Manual originated in 1929 as a short journal article that provided
basic standards for preparing manuscripts to be submitted for publication (Bentley
et al., 1929).
• It was later expanded and published as a book by the association and is now in its
seventh edition.

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 • The primary purpose of APA style is to facilitate scientific communication by
promoting clarity of expression and by standardizing the organization and content
of research articles and book chapters.
• It is easier to write about research when you know what information to present, the
order in which to present it, and even the style in which to present it.
• Likewise, it is easier to read about research when it is presented in familiar and
expected ways.
• APA style is best thought of as a “genre” of writing that is appropriate for presenting
the results of psychological research—especially in academic and professional
contexts.
• It is not synonymous with “good writing” in general. You would not write a literary
analysis for an English class, even if it were based on psychoanalytic concepts, in
APA style. You would write it in Modern Language Association (MLA) style instead.
And you would not write a newspaper article, even if it were about a new
breakthrough in behavioral neuroscience, in APA style.
• You would write it in Associated Press (AP) style instead. At the same time, you
would not write an empirical research report in MLA style, in AP style, or in the
style of a romance novel, an e-mail to a friend, or a shopping list.
• You would write it in APA style. Part of being a good writer in general is adopting
a style that is appropriate to the writing task at hand, and for writing about
psychological research, this is APA style.

The Levels of APA Style

Because APA style consists of a large number and variety of guidelines—

the Publication Manual is nearly 300 pages long—it can be useful to think about it in terms
of three basic levels.

The first is the overall organization of an article Empirical research reports, in particular,
have several distinct sections that always appear in the same order:

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 1. Title page: Presents the article title and author names and affiliations.
2. Abstract: Summarizes the research.
3. Introduction: Describes previous research and the rationale for the current study.
4. Method: Describes how the study was conducted.
5. Results: Describes the results of the study.
6. Discussion : Summarizes the study and discusses its implications.
7. References : Lists the references cited throughout the article.

Writing clearly and concisely” which includes guidelines for the clear expression of
ideas. There are two important themes here. One is that APA-style writing is formal rather
than informal. It adopts a tone that is appropriate for communicating with professional
colleagues—other researchers and practitioners—who share an interest in the topic.
Beyond this shared interest, however, these colleagues are not necessarily similar to the
writer or to each other. A graduate student in British Columbia might be writing an article
that will be read by a young psychotherapist in Toronto and a respected professor of
psychology in Tokyo. Thus formal writing avoids slang, contractions, pop culture
references, humor, and other elements that would be acceptable in talking with a friend
or in writing informally.

The second theme of high-level APA style is that it is straightforward. This means that
it communicates ideas as simply and clearly as possible, putting the focus on the ideas
themselves and not on how they are communicated. Thus APA-style writing minimizes
literary devices such as metaphor, imagery, irony, suspense, and so on. Again, humor is
kept to a minimum. Sentences are short and direct. Technical terms must be used, but
they are used to improve communication, not simply to make the writing sound more
“scientific.” For example, if participants immersed their hands in a bucket of ice water, it
is better just to write this than to write that they “were subjected to a pain-inducement
apparatus.” At the same time, however, there is no better way to communicate that a
between-subjects design was used than to use the term “between-subjects design.

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 Video links:

Citation
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDGdqoC
yAtw
Citation and Referencing
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3ntLOPq
Cpg
The Basics of APA In-text Citations
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhD4xaG
AcRs
Introduction to Citation styles: APA
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVv2Jt0o
18

References:

• Munroe, Randall. "Wikipedian Protester". xkcd.

Retrieved 25 May 2020.
• "Definition of CITATION". www.merriam-
webster.com. Retrieved 2018-08-04.
• Journal Development, Yakkaldevi,
A., ISBN 9781312755321
• "What Does it Mean to Cite?". MIT Academic
Integrity.
• Association of Legal Writing Directors & Darby
Dickerson, ALWD Citation Manual: A
Professional System of Citation,4th ed. (New
York: Aspen, 2010), 3.

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