APA Style
APA - American Psychological Association Style was created in 1929. The group of psychologists and publishers decided to create a citation style especially for psychology and related sciences research works writing.
The Association itself was established in 1892 by the group of 31 scientists who were interested in new science studying. Now there are more than 150,000 members in this organization. In 1928 they organized a conference the result of which was the adoption of standards for publications and other scientific works writing.
APA style is used for such works writing as: term papers, research reports and literature reviews, articles - theoretical and methodological and sometimes for case studies writing.
Usually a research paper written with APA style formatting has the following structure:
- Title page
- Abstract (it can be omitted)
- Introduction (may contain an abstract if it was omitted)
- Methods or Methodology
- Results
- Discussion or Conclusion
- References
- Appendices (if they needed).
The main attention should be paid to typeface, spacing (double as usual), margins and headings.
The other important moment is the reference formatting. They can be of two types: in-text and bibliography references.
When you need to indicate in-text reference you should indicate authors` surname and year of work publication. For example, "It is reported that there has been more information in circulation in the last 30 years than in any previous periods before (Allen, 2001)." You can cite author in the end of the sentence or indicate him in the text itself, e.g. "In 2003 Allen said that..."
In bibliography you should indicate your sources in alphabetical order by the author's surname. The whole reference should contain the following information:
- Author's name or names (in case of several authors you may indicate them using '&' in text)
- Date of work publication
- Work title
- Publication data.
