APA Formatting - References: Study with Video Lessons, Practice Problems & Examples

APA Formatting - References

Hey everyone! So this video is meant to be used as a guide if you're going to be writing research papers in your psychology course and maybe you're a bit unfamiliar with APA formatting. We're going to be going over how to cite a journal article, both in your in-text references as well as your end-of-text references. So if that is something that you need some help with, feel free to stick around. Alright, so when you are going to be writing papers in your psychology class, you're going to have to include a reference using APA formatting basically anytime you paraphrase or talk about somebody else's work or anytime that you state something as a fact, even if that fact feels very obvious to you.

So diving into those in-text references, or basically the references that will happen in the body of your paper, we're always going to be including the author's last names as well as the date of publication. And we have two different formats that we can follow for our in-text references. So the first is called a parenthetical citation. So with a parenthetical citation, you just write out your sentence as you normally would, so, you know, culture seems to play a role in shaping behavior, then you add your reference in parentheses at the end. We have parentheses, we have our author names, comma, date of publication, close parentheses.

So that is a parenthetical citation. Now, we can also have what is called a narrative citation. And with a narrative citation, you basically kind of work the reference into your actual sentence structure. We might say something like Smith and Harris, 2009, found that culture plays a role in shaping behavior. So now we have our author names no longer in parentheses, we no longer need a comma, then we have our date of publication in parentheses.

So the date is always in parentheses. So both parenthetical and narrative citations are accepted formats. You can use any combination of them that you like. You can, you know, if you prefer parenthetical you can write more of those. You can do a 50-50 split, however you want to do it.

Now one nice little reprieve that APA formatting has offered us is that when a paper has 3 or more authors, you can shorten your in-text citations using the phrase et al. So for example, Jones, Dawson, and Clark, 2007 would turn into Jones et al., 2007. So your first author name is always going to be there, but then all the other author names can get replaced by the phrase et al., always followed by a period. So that can be used both for parenthetical or narrative citations. It is correct in both formats.

Alright. So moving on to our end-of-text references. Now, when it comes to end-of-text references, there are many different websites that will generate these for you and I do recommend using those. I use them myself. They will save you a ton of time.

However, please always double-check them because quite often, they will scramble components, they will be missing a component, they'll be missing an author name. Those websites are useful, but they are not perfect. So I'm just going to go over the individual components of an end-of-text reference just so that you would know what to look for and understand how to format them so you can go ahead and correct those automated lists if need be. So with our end-of-text references, we are always going to be beginning with our authors. Okay.

And we're going to write those out as last name, first initial, and if available, the middle initial as well. Okay. So we start with our authors and then we have our publication date, that should be in parentheses, the date is always in parentheses. Next up we have the title of our paper. Okay.

And the title should be pretty much all in lowercase except for the very first word, or for any proper nouns, of course. Once we have our title, following that we will have our journal, so the name of the journal. Okay. And that is always going to appear in italics. Immediately following the journal, we have the volume number as well as the issue number.

Both of these are basically the volume and issue of the journal. You should be able to find these on either, like, the top or bottom of the first page. They're usually pretty easy to find. Next up we have the page numbers. Again, very easy to find either at the top or bottom of the pages of your research paper.

And then we will finish up our citation with the URL or the DOI, which stands for digital object identifier. These are pretty easy to find. These are also often at the top of the page on the very first page. Sometimes it's the actual URL that you are following to find that article, but they're pretty easy to find nowadays as well. Alright.

So those are the individual components and that is the order that they belong in. So again, please be checking those references if you do use any websites to generate them for you. Alright. So that is APA formatting in a nutshell, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye bye.

APA Formatting - References Example 1

Alright, so let's imagine we are writing a research paper and we have to cite the following results. So we're going to use the information here to write both a parenthetical citation and a narrative citation in APA format. Our authors for this paper are Kent, Lee, Johnson, and Garcia. Since we have more than 3 authors, we can use et al. to shorten that, which is very nice.

The date is 2018, and the results indicate that parental involvement was significantly associated with children's academic success. We have a significant p-value there, suggesting that children with more involved parents tend to perform better academically. Note that typically, it is not necessary to include details like p-values when describing results in research papers unless your professor has specifically requested this level of detail. It is usually assumed that the results were significant if they are mentioned.

I did write out my citations a bit just so that you're not watching me write for the next 5 minutes. But beginning with this parenthetical citation here, that's going to be the one that is literally just in parentheses at the end, right? I wrote out 'parental involvement seems to be associated with children's academic success.' And then for my citation, we'll have parentheses.

We'll have Kent, he was the first author. We have Kent and then et al., comma, and then 2018, close parenthesis. And there is our parenthetical citation. Now for our narrative citation, this is the one that will begin with the author's names in a more conversational tone.

When you have more than 3 authors and you're doing a narrative citation, you can either use et al. or you can say "and colleagues," which just sounds a little fluffier and nicer. That's my personal preference, but both are correct by APA standards. So for our narrative citation, I'm going to begin it by saying Kent, again the first author and colleagues, then parentheses 2018. So Kent and colleagues (2018) found that parental involvement was associated with children's academic success.

But again, in this case, you could put Kent et al. 2018, and that would also be correct by APA standards. Alright. So that is our little parenthetical and narrative citation example, and I will see you guys in the next video. Bye bye.