Hello, I am Maral Erol, your disciplinary consultant for Social Sciences, and in this video, I am going to tell you a little about Citations and Social Sciences, with a particular focus on the APA style. So there are two frequently used systems in social sciences. One of them is the Chicago Manual of Style, and the other is APA, which is short for American Psychological Association Style Manual, and in this video, this is what I'm going to tell you about. I will also use some online examples here and some of the examples that I made up for this video. Some of the important things to know for APA are, how current your sources are, and that is why the dates are important as well as the author's name added in-text citations, which is what I'm going to tell you in a couple of minutes, you include the date as well as the name of the author unlike, for example, MLA, which only uses the author's name. Also, there is a special emphasis that APA puts on reducing bias in language, and they have three main rules for that: One of them is that you need to, when you are using some of the definitions, you need to use an appropriate level of specificity. For example, you don't say participants over 18 years of age, but you specify saying 18 to 35 year olds. The other rule is being sensitive to labels. So for example, you don't say “autistic children” because that's defining a group of people with just their disability, but you say “children diagnosed with autism.” And the last rule is acknowledging participation, and especially in psychology, there are a lot of experiments made with people. So, instead of saying “the survey is administered to the students,” you say, “the students completed the survey,” which gives more agency, more participation to the participants, basically. So I'll talk a little bit about the document design. When you are preparing a manuscript in APA, there are a couple of typical sections for an APA manuscript: One of them is the title page. The second one is the abstract; you generally write an abstract for any APA manuscript. And then, you start with an introduction, and there's a methods section, followed by the results section, and then you would have a discussion of the results as another section, and then, it is followed by a list references, and if you have other material and documents that you would want to add, you would have appendices after that. So, first of all, I'm going to tell you some more about document design, but before we move on to that, I'd like to remind you that you don't need to memorize everything that I'm telling you in this video. The general idea about any kind of citation is you need to be able to consult the manual. There are online guidelines that I'm also going to give you a list of at the end of this video. There are also a number of handbooks that are available in the market, especially if you are living in the US. If you are not, the number of online sources would still be sufficient for you. I'm mainly going to go over the very basic, very general guidelines for APA for this video, but know that there are many more details to most of these, and make sure that you consult the resources for any kind of more specific information. So with the heading information, first of all, let me start with the titles and the other headings. On the title page as well as the other pages, you would need to have, first of all, a running head, which starts on the first page—on the title page—and repeats itself on the other pages. The major headings that you're going to have would be centered and written in boldface and written in title case, as you can see, like in this example here. And after the major headings, the second level headings are flush left and boldface, and there are more details about this again in the manuals or textbooks or online information that I'm not going to get into. Then after the headings, we have the information about the page numbering. The page numbers are supposed to be in the upper right corner in Arabic numerals as shown in here, which means that they are different from Roman numerals. The margins, font, and notes—you need to use a serif font like Times New Roman for the main text and a sans serif font like Arial for figure labels if you are using any figures. You need to write your manuscript double spaced; indent the first line of every paragraph about one half inch; align your text to the left; and if you're going to use footnotes, you will need to use them for additional explanations, not for references, as the in-text citations are going to be in the form of parenthetical citations. So I know that you cannot see it very clearly here, but this is an example of a title page of an APA manuscript. As you can see, in here, there's the header, the running head information like here; also, in here, you can see the page number. In this area, roughly, you see the title and the name of the author and where the author belongs, which is the school's name. And at the end of the page, you would have a note, an author’s note that gives a little bit more specific information in here. Here you can see those elements a little more clearly. Here, as you can see, the running head actually starts with the word “running head,” and after a colon you write the title, or like short title of your manuscript in all capital letters. And then, in the section where you have the heading, the title, you have the full title, your name and institution, and in the author’s note section, you have something that says, for example, this paper was prepared for physiology 101. The second page usually is the abstract page. It again has the name “Abstract” written at center at the beginning of the text. It is not indented, as is the case with the actual manuscript, so it just starts from here. And you would also have a running head going on in the second page, with the page number on the right-hand side again. And here's the first page or the introduction page of the manuscript. Again, you have the title in here centered. The first line of the paragraph is indented. You still have your running head and your page number in here. So, that was the document design, and I'm going to give you, again, very brief, very general information about in-text citations. The most important information that you should know, that you should include in in-text parenthetical citations in APA, is you should always have the name of the author, the date, and especially if you are quoting directly, the page number. So, there are several examples in here that I can show you. If you're paraphrasing for example, after you say what you're going to say, you have a parenthesis with the author's name, a comma, date, comma, and the page number where this information is coming from preceded by a ”p” and a full stop. Or you can divide that information: You can give the name of the author in the sentence that you have, followed by the date in parantheses here, and then you would have the page number at the end of your sentence. Again, similarly, if you have a quotation, you can start with the author's name: Comer stated (and then give the quotation), and end with the parenthetical citation with the date and the page number. There will be variations about how you cite different kinds of sources, depending on how many authors you have for example, whether or not you are lacking an author or if the institute acts as an author, for all of these variations, I'm not going to go into details of these. Please consult either the online sources, or the style manual, or one of the handbooks. So, when it comes to the list of references that you're supposed to have at the end of your manuscript, again, we have a couple of different rules, variations. I am now going to tell you about the three most common ones today that are used in academic writing: One of them is how you cite a book; the other one is an edited book chapter; and the last one is a journal article. So the way you cite a book is you start with the surname of the author, followed by the initials. So surname, the initials: first initial, middle initial, and then you give the date in parentheses. And then, you give the title of the book in sentence case, so, you do not capitalize all the words; you only capitalize the first one and the one that comes after the colon, which is the subtitle. And you also obviously capitalize the proper nouns. And now you give, here, the publication information. For the edited book chapter, it is more or less the same. For this example, we have two authors. You give the surnames and the initials, and there is a little ampersand in the middle when you have two people writing the same thing—co-writing. And then you have the date again, and the title, not italicized, the title of the chapter. It is followed by “In,” and the names of the editors (this time their surname doesn't come first), and then you go on, you add the title of the book in italicized form, and in parentheses, you give the pages where the chapter is, and the publication information. The journal article is in a way similar to the edited book chapter. Again, we start with the author, the date, in here the title of the article, and then the title of the journal italicized—and this is important— unlike the other titles, the journal titles are also capitalized. Give the volume, and in parentheses the issue, and at the end, you also give the page range of the article. And when you are listing those references, you alphabetize everything and then indent after the first line. Here in this example, you can see the formatting of it a little bit better. You start with the name “References”; the heading is centered; there's double spacing going on here as well, and the half-inch indent after the first name. So lastly, I would like to give you a couple of useful sources, resources for APA, which are free and online: The first one is the Basic APA tutorial from the official APA website; I would really recommend that you watch this. It's a very informative and useful video. The second one is Research and Documentation online website, and the third one is the Purdue website, both of which have much more detailed information about both the citation practices, and also you can see some sample pages for manuscripts written in the APA style. Thank you for listening and see you again in another video.
