What are the rules for APA citation?

What Are The Rules For APA citation?

Whether you are writing a thesis paper for your research work or a scholarly document for the upcoming journal, taking information from multifarious sources is imminent. Many times, you often need to quote a statement directly, especially while working on literary and artistic papers.

During such times, one thing that should always be included in your work is the citation. Also known as referencing, it is one of the crucial components of every research paper or journal.

It not only provides direct information about the source of information you have used but also proves that your work is genuine and without any plagiarism.

Every Australian university makes sure to check the submitted research assignments thoroughly so that the citations are done in the appropriate style and manner. 

As a student or a research fellow, you must understand the importance of citation for different forms of documentation and assignments.

Only then will you be able to pay your full attention to the work you are doing and successfully adhere to the university norms and regulations.

Why Citation Is Important For Assignments and research papers?

Most often, people fail to acknowledge the true power of citations and consider them merely to be a writing pattern that should be followed while drafting any study or research paper. However, that’s not the case in real-time.

Truth  be told, citations play a crucial role in adding weightage and value to your study, ensuring it can provide a direct fact check and prove your hard work and efforts. To illustrate the statement further, we have listed a few ways citations can help your research. 

1.  Acts as a fact-checking tool: Citations act as a direct source of facts you are planning to include in your work, whether it’s a reference to a relevant study from another author or a direct quote from a literary source. Anyone reading your paper can refer to the citation and view the source to check its authenticity. In other words, these references make your work look more authentic, genuine, and credible. 

2. Better research practice: Without a doubt, including citations in your work will help you become a better researcher. They prove you haven’t copied the stuff directly from anywhere. Instead, you have put your efforts in researching about the topics, understanding the facts, and formulating the concepts in your own words. 

3. Helps build credibility: When you are including any critic statement or a scientific fact in your work, mentioning the citation will help you build a strong ground for your paper. You can directly say that the facts presented are from authentic sources, with no adulteration or manipulation. Furthermore, it will make your research paper or scholarly journal have the required weightage to stand out in the crowd. 

4.  Acts as a verification tool: The moment you cite the sources properly in your paper, it becomes easier for the editors, proofreaders, and other critics to verify the references and determine the accuracy. 

What is APA citation in academic writing?

Out of all the different forms of citations used in research papers and journals, APA or American Psychological Association is the most preferred and popular one. While it is mainly seen in psychological papers and social science studies, you can incorporate the style in other documents also, provided the rules are properly adhered to.

As per the recent rules in the 7th edition, sentence case is to be used while citing webpages, reports, and articles while for magazines and newspapers, title case has to be used. 

Rules of including APA citation 

Knowing the APA style of citation is crucial to ensure your document adheres to all the guidelines and can offer a direct insight into the sources you referred to.

Usually, people skip the learning part and directly start working on the citations. It can result in wrong patterns, incorrect positioning, and other forms of mistakes.

If your document also has these mistakes, the credibility and authenticity will take the negative blow, rendering your paper less appealing and reliable. 

Owing to this, below we have discussed the rules that you need to adhere to while including the APA citation style in your writing. 

In-text citations

•    Always use the format Author, Date to cite your sentence. For instance, a general citation looks like Jones, 1996 while a more specific form will include the line numbers, like Jones, 1996, 100-101.
•    The names and proper nouns need to be capitalized. 
•    For citing any source’s title, words with more than four characters should be capitalized. 
•    If there is more than one author for the source, include the names in a single phrase. Also, you need to use the phrase “et al.” for this matter. 

Reference list

•    Include the entire reference list at the end of your work on a separate page. 
•    Listing should be done alphabetically with double spacing.
•    Include the major four elements in your reference list, i.e, author name, date, title, and source. 

Conclusion 

Citations might look complicated at the beginning, especially if you are doing it for the first time. The likeliness to make mistakes is pretty high, which can directly impact your assignment’s authenticity. So, if you are struggling with citations, do not worry and connect with Digi Assignment Help.

Not only the team will help in completing the work with proper research, but also ensure to follow the guidelines of APA citation till the end. 

 

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