APA Requirements for Crediting Sources Accurately

In order to be part of the academic writing community, there are certain requirements to be followed. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) is the appropriate documentation system to follow in Psychology and other Social Science fields, such as Education. Among APA guidelines, this paper will focus on in-text citations and references: the sources cited in in-text citations (either paraphrased, parenthetical, block or direct quotation) have to be included in the reference list, in alphabetical order and double-spaced, and at the same time, every entry in the list must be cited on the paper. The aim of this analysis is to evaluate the level of completion of APA guidelines for in-text citations and references in the article Beyond Reflection: Teaching Learning as Praxis by Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles and López-Torres (2003).

As regards in-text citations, Chapter 6 of APA Manual provides the rules for acknowledging sources and formatting quotations. According to section 6.03 (APA Manual, 2010), reproduction of the exact words of another author’s work is a direct quotation of a source, in which case, (a) the name of the author, year and specific page citation have to be provided in the text, (b) if the quotation is less than 40 words, it has to be within double quotation marks and incorporated into the text, and (c) if the quotation is shown in the middle of the sentence, “the source has to be cited immediately after the quotation marks” (p. 171). In the article under analysis, it can be observed that this requirement is not fulfilled, as the following example shows: “Case studies of teacher education programs based on reflection reveals that issues of social and political curriculum transformation are generally avoided, misinterpreted, or resisted (Vavrus & Ozcan, 1996, p.3)” (Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles, & Lopez-Torres, 2003, p.250. The source is cited, mistakenly, without using double quotation marks. Additionally, elements, such as the number of the page from where the quotations have been extracted, are omitted. A clear example is when the author leaves out the letter p to show the number of the page of a direct source, as in ‘Cole, 1996, 121’ (Hoffman-Kipp et al., 2003, p.252).

Following the guidelines of section 6.03 for paraphrased material, in which information or ideas are expressed altering the sentence, immediately after the name of the author has to be displayed the year of the publication between parenthesis and main idea cited. Although the authors attempt to comply with this format, there are some parts of the article where the year of publication was not included. "Engestrom explains that" (Hoffman-Kipp et al., 2003, p.250) is an explicit representation of this lack of consistency. Furthermore, when citing from three to five authors, all author surnames have to be cited the first time, and in following citations, only the first author surname followed by et al. has to be provided. The researchers do not mention the surnames of all the authors the first time that the borrowed concept appears in the text as ‘Engestrom et al., 1999’ (Hoffman-Kipp et al., 2003, p.250) accounts for this particular issue.

In relation to reference components, sections 6.27 to 6.31 of the APA (2010) manual offer an extensive detail. The reference list (a) must be formatted with a hanging indent, (b) double-spaced, (c) alphabetically ordered and (d) organized on a new page by the end of the article (APA Manual, 2010). Although the authors respect certain features such as the alphabetical order and the inclusion of every single source cited in the paper, there are some other aspects that have been neglected as spacing requirements and the display of the reference entries on a separate page.

As a conclusion, it can be stated that even though the researchers attempt to structure their writing according to APA style, further extensive proofreading must be done in order to display an article of quality and academic style.

References

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Hoffman-Kipp, P., Artiles, A.J., & López-Torres, L. (2003). Beyond reflection: Teaching learning as praxis. Theory into practice, 42(3), 248-254. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/45873