APA question

This discussion was created from comments split from: It isnt APA format.
  • edited March 25, 2019
    If the APA style version isn't listed on the course syllabus you should tactfully try to find out the professor's preferred version. There is at least one professor at my university who demands that students use an earlier version and takes points off of students' grades for content types not mentioned in early APA style manual versions. Older forms of punctuation are followed.

    As was suggested earlier please verify whether including issue numbers is appropriate for each journal article you cite.

    @adamsmith @bwiernik I have a question about ePub ahead of print articles and when/how DOI strings are used in the cite style. I seem to remember something about the presence or absence of a page number as the trigger for inclusion of the DOI. I know of several nursing, psychology (and other) journals that provide [false] page numbers with the ePub metadata, for example as an indication of the number of pages in the article. Could the presence of false page numbers cause citation problems if not edited out by a user?

    I can't call myself an expert on APA style but I didn't see any errors in the examples provided (except, possibly, for the issue numbers). One possible problem might be the format of the DOI as a web address instead of a bare DOI string. There is a professor at my school who insists on the use of the DOI without the web stuff. It doesn't matter that a URL format is now the proper standard. She says that she follows the _book_ and will change only when a new version is released.

    Another professor demands changes to line spacing in the bibliography from standard APA style. She wants 1.5 line spacing within a reference and double spacing between references. Another requires 2nd and 3rd lines of a reference to be indented. Without any justification each insists that their line spacing and indent demands are actually the "true" APA style.




  • [T]akes points off of students' grades for content types not mentioned in early APA style manual versions.
    Okay, I'm calling sadism here.
  • APA style says to always provide the DOI if one exists. Also to give a full text URL if available and there is no DOI. Other styles test for the presence of page to determine whether URL/DOI should be listed. In those cases, the DOI stub that some publishers put in the `page` metadata would be a problem. Most translators remove those, I believe.
  • (I'd really like to keep this thread helpful to the original poster if they return, so let's please move discussions about APA style details -- which are obviously very welcome -- to new threads)
Sign In or Register to comment.