APA definition

1. Chinhoyi University of
Technology
APA Referencing
Style Overview

2. APA: Introduction
 Every time you make a statement, a claim, an assertion, an opinion, you
MUST show your audience the EVIDENCE on which it is based.
 Your studies are built on establishing the validity, reliability, integrity, and
relevance of the evidence that underpins one’s opinions.
 When you refer to someone else’s words or ideas in your text, the
source/s should be acknowledged by stating the author and year.
 You must always acknowledge your sources otherwise you will be guilty of
plagiarism.
 CUT uses the American Psychological Association (APA) 6h edition style
of citations and referencing . Please note that APA style covers more than
just citations and referencing, also covers how you format your document,
right down to specifying the margin size.
 However, at CUT it is only the referencing and citation aspect of APA style
that we are concerned with.
 Please note that the following material has been sourced from a variety of
places including the APA official website (http://www.apastyle.org) and
the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th
ed.).

3. What is APA Style?
 APA (American Psychological Association) referencing style is an
author-date citation style with two main features:
 In-text citations, when you refer to another author's work you must
cite your source by providing the last name(s) of the author(s) and
the year of publication. No distinction is made between books,
journal articles, internet documents or other formats in the body
of your work.
 It uses the author-date system : (Smith, 2012) to provide brief
references wherever information has been incorporated from
another source.
 Reference list which appears at the end of your assignment and
includes a full description of each source you have cited, listing
them in alphabetical order by the author's last name.

4. Why reference?
 Standard practice for acknowledging information
sources in academic writing at university.
 At university level, you're expected to research widely
and build your knowledge from the expertise of others.
 Referencing links what you read with what you write.
 Strengthens your arguments and add credibility by
referring to expert ideas.
 Allows you or someone else to find the source of your
information.
 Avoids plagiarism by acknowledging that you’ve used
the ideas and work of others.

5. Plagiarism
 Plagiarism is the reproduction of somebody else’s
work or ideas, presenting it as your own without
giving recognition to that person.
 Plagiarism is defined as “presenting another
person’s ideas, findings or work as one’s own,
either intentionally or unintentionally, and
without acknowledgement of the original
source”.
 Submission of plagiarised work is referred to as
academic theft and is taken seriously and may
result in penalties that may lead to expulsion.

6. Keys to preventing plagiarism

7. Keys to preventing plagiarism

8. Keys to preventing plagiarism

9. Sources of referencing
 Opinions , Theories
 Statements/Claims Statistics
 Graphs/Tables
 Books and journals
 Online content
 Posters/Audio visuals Yearbooks
 Conference Proceedings
 Manuscripts ,Government Publications
 Theses and Dissertations
 Magazines and Newspapers

10. Parts of Referencing
 In-text referencing in the body of the text.
 Reference list placed at the end of the paper.
Any citation given in-text must be included
in the reference list, and vice-versa.

11. Text referencing
 A text reference consists of the author’s surname, the date and
page number(s) where the information referred to was found.
 Any time information from another source is used in your
assignment, a short in-text reference to that source must be
provided.
 Always make a corresponding entry in the reference list which
contains information about the source in order to locate it easily.
 Text references can be made in either one of two ways:
As part of the sentence/integral referencing/author prominence:
According to Healy (2011) patients need to know that they can trust and
rely on health care practitioners to take care of their problems.
At the end of the sentence/non-integral/information prominence:
Patients need to know that they can trust and rely on health care
practitioners to take care of their problems (Healy, 2011).

12. Text referencing cont’d
 You can incorporate an author’s findings,
ideas, and work into your paper by:
 Paraphrasing/Summarising – an author’s
work is expressed in your own words.
 Direct quotations – an author’s work is
quoted word for word inside quotation marks
or indented in a block format.
 NB:Paraphrasing is usually preferred over
direct quotations

13. In-text paraphrasing
 Putting in your own words what the author has
written.
 There are two ways you can reference: the author’s
name can be incorporated in your text/sentence or
included in brackets with the year of publication.
For example:
 In her book, Moyo (2016) stresses the fundamental
importance of education to society.
OR
 Central to modern society is a belief in the importance
of education (Moyo, 2016).

14. In-text quotations
 Some information, like definitions, is best presented without
paraphrasing the content and should be quoted word for
word . Please note that direct quotations (short or long)
should be avoided wherever possible in any essay or report;
you should instead construct your own arguments .
 Whenever you do quote a source directly, remember to give
the page number (or a paragraph number if there is no
pagination) after the year as part of your citation.
 If the quotation comprises fewer than 40 words, incorporate it
into the text and enclose it with quotation marks.
Example:
 “Learning is a relatively permanent change in knowledge or
skill produced by experience ” (Weiss, 1990, p. 172).

15. Quotation comprising 40 or more words
 If the quotation comprises 40 or more words, display it in a
freestanding block of text and omit the quotation marks.
Example:
The rejection of my own manuscripts has a sordid
aftermath: (a) one day of depression; (b) one day of
utter contempt for the editor and his accomplices; (c)
one day of decrying the conspiracy against letting
Truth be published; (d) one day of fretful ideas about
changing my profession; (e) one day of re-evaluating
the manuscript in view of the editors comments
followed by the conclusion that I was lucky it wasn’t
accepted! (Underwood, 1957, p. 87).

16. Secondary referencing (authors quoting or citing
other authors)
 When you reference an author who is quoting another
information source that you haven’t seen.
 APA guidance is that secondary sources should only be used
sparingly, for instance when the original work is out of print,
not available in English or otherwise inaccessible.
 You should always try to find the original work but if that is
not possible, you need to make it clear that you have not seen
the original source yourself.
Example:
 In an early study, Müller and Pilzecker (as cited in Dewar,
Cowan, & Della Salla, 2007) found newly formed memories
may be lost through interference.
Reference List
 Dewar, M. T., Cowan, N., & Della Salla, S. (2007). Forgetting due to retroactive interference:
A fusion of Müller and Pilzecker’s (1900) early insights into everyday forgetting and recent
research on anterograde amnesia. Cortex, 43 (5), 616 -634.

17. Text references to more than one
source
 When referring to more than one source in a
statement, arrange the references alphabetically
according to the first author, in the same order
they will appear in the reference list. Use a semi-
colon to separate the references.
For example:
 The field of inclusive education has been
criticised for inadequate theoretical rigour and
conceptual clarity (Allan, 2014; Black-Moyo,
2015; Waitoller & Artiles, 2013; Zindi, 2020).

18. Chapter in an edited book
Include the following information:
Surnames and initials of chapter author(s) (Published Year). Chapter title. In
Initials and surnames of editor(s) (Ed.) or (Eds.), Title of book (page numbers of
whole chapter). Place of Publication: Publisher.
Example:
Hinton, D. P., & Stevens-Gill, D. (2016). Psychometrics in organisational settings. In
A. Attrill & C. Fullwood (Eds.), Applied cyberpsychology: Practical applications
of cyberpsychological research and theory (pp. 236-255). London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
 If the book chapter has been accessed in an e-book, the place and publisher
details are not required. Give instead the doi: (when available) or Retrieved
from web address at the end of your reference.
Hinton, D. P., & Stevens-Gill, D. (2016). Psychometrics in organisational settings. In
A. Attrill & C. Fullwood (Eds.), Applied cyberpsychology: Practical applications
of cyberpsychological research and theory (pp. 236-255).
doi:10.1057/9781137517036

19. Authorship
 The author is the person responsible for the
intellectual content of a source.
 Authors can also be an institution or
organisation, for example a university
yearbook or a report by a government
department.

20. Authors
One author
 In most cases, providing the author's last name
and the publication year are sufficient:
Smith (1997) or (Smith, 1997) compared reaction
times...
Two authors
 If there are two authors, include the last name of
each and the publication year:
...as James and Ryerson (1999) demonstrated...
...as has been shown (James & Ryerson, 1999)...

21. 3 - 5 Authors
 If there are three to five authors, cite all
authors the first time; in subsequent
citations, include only the last name of the
first author followed by "et al." and the year:
 Williams, Jones, Smith, Bradner, and
Torrington (1983) found...
Williams et al. (1983) also noticed that..

22. Corporate authors
 The names of groups that serve as authors
(e.g. corporations, associations, government
agencies, and study groups) are usually
spelled out each time they appear in a text
citation. If it will not cause confusion for the
reader, names may be abbreviated thereafter:
 First citation: (Chinhoyi University of
Technology[CUT], 2020)
Subsequent citations: (CUT, 2020)

23. Figures and tables
 In the APA referencing style, any type of illustration other
than a table is called a figure. A figure may be a chart,
graph, photograph, drawing, digital image or other
depiction.
 All figures and tables should be numbered consecutively
with Arabic numerals throughout the article in the order in
which they are first mentioned in text (i.e., Figure 1,
Figure 2; Table 1, Table 2).
 In the text of your assignment, refer to figures and tables
by their numbers, e.g. (see Figure 1).
 Examples:
As shown in Figure 2, the relationships are…
Children with pre-training (see Table 5) …

24. Sources - Books

25. Sources - Journal articles

26. Other online sources

27. Reference List OR Bibliography
 All references cited within the text are listed with more
detail in the reference list at the end of the paper.
 Only references cited within the text are included in the
reference list.
 You may be asked to provide a bibliography instead of a
reference list.
 A bibliography is a list usually compiled at the end of a
paper and includes all sources consulted while researching
and preparing your paper, whether or not they have been
cited within the text.
 You will only need to provide a reference list or a
bibliography, not both. Please check with your
Department/Lecturer/Supervisor.

28. REFERENCE LIST KEY ELEMENTS

29. Reference List Example
Airey, D. (2010). Logo design love: A guide to creating iconic brand identities.
Berkeley, CA: New Riders
Aspinall, V. (Ed.). (2014). Clinical procedures in veterinary nursing (3rd ed.).
Edinburgh, Scotland: Elsevier.
Beattie, B. R., & LaFrance, J. T. (2006). The law of demand versus diminishing
marginal utility. Review of Agricultural Economics, 28(2), 263–
271. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9353.2006.00286.x
Huy, C., Becker, S., Gomolinsky, U., Klein, T., & Thiel, A. (2008). Health,
medical risk factors and bicycle use in everyday life in the over-50
population. Journal of Aging & Physical Activity, 16(4), 454-464.
Ponniah, J., Hu, Y.-C., & Kumar, P. R. (2015). A clean slate approach to secure
wireless networking. Harare: Blacks
Unlimited. https://doi.org/10.1561/1300000037
Zhang, L. F., & Sternberg, R. J. (2010). Learning in a cross-cultural perspective.
In V. G. Aukrust (Ed.), Learning and cognition in education (3rd ed., pp. 16-
22). Elsevier.

30. Reference Management Software
• This is a package that helps authors to compile, organize, and use
bibliographic references or citations.
• The package helps authors to import references directly into their own
database from many online information sources.
• The package works in conjunction with word processing package to insert
in-text citations, footnotes and bibliography into a document and then
automatically format to your preferred style.
• There are various reference management software packages The main
packages commonly being used
include: Endnote, Mendeley and Zotero. Some packages are free, some
are paid for.
• Chinhoyi University Library train students and staff on using Mendeley.

31. Useful websites
1. https://owl.purdue.edu/
 The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses writing
resources and instructional material as a free service of the Writing Lab
at Purdue.
 Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find
information to assist with many writing projects.
2. www.retractionwatch.com
 Shines light on problems with papers and, by doing so, educates and
celebrates research ethics and good practice. Peer pressure is a powerful
tool — but only if peers are aware of infractions and bad practice.
3. https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/website/
 This blog talks about writing, research, grammar, and APA citation style.
4. www.grammarly.com
 Free writing app to make your online writing clear and effective.