Analysis of a Reference List according to the American Psychological Association Manual

The reference list is an important part of an academic paper; it will present the resources that the authors used to complete their research for their work. The reference list provides the reader with the necessary information to locate and retrieve any source cited in the paper. All the sources that are cited must appear in the reference list. (Purdue Owl, 2014).  According to the American Psychological Association (APA) the references should be in a new page separated from the rest of the text. This page should have the title References centered at the top of the page, not in bold neither underlined. All the text presented at this page has to be double spaced as the rest of the text in the paper (2010). The APA manual present rules for the academic papers, however not all them follow the APA style and because of this, they might not be taken as part of the academic world.  The purpose of this work is to analyse a reference list under the APA style conventions.

The reference list of the academical paper to be analysed does not contain the title “Reference” as the APA (2010) establishes, it instead has the title of “Works cited”. Although the title is not correct, it is well centered and it is not in bold neither underlined as the manual suggests. Leaving aside the title, the three sources belong to papers of liberal arts and humanities which follow the Modern Language Association style (MLA).

The differences among the MLA and the APA style are noticeable. The first source cited in the reference list does not contain the authors in the first part, it has on the contrary the title of the work and it is between inverted commas. The date when the source was retrieved is not clear, moreover, it does not contain the word retrieved neither the link of the web page. The second and the third source contain similar discrepancies with the APA (2010) style; they contain the authors but appear the full names and surnames. The APA (2010) manual suggests that in the reference list should show the surname of the authors and the name should be abbreviated. As the first source, the second and the third have similar problems. They do not have the link of the source. At the same time, the reference list should have the dates of publications in brackets.

In conclusion, not all the papers follow the APA style, it will depend on the format and the style the authors use. The reference list analysed under the APA style presented many discrepancies as the sources were cited under the MLA style. The reference list cannot be easily read to follow the links; on the contrary if it followed the APA style it would facilitate the task of trying to follow the sources.

References

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

 Purdue OWL (2014). APA style workshop. Retrieved May 2014 from https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/664/1/