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| Home > Understanding Citations > 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 | Definitions |
References to sources within the text of your paper are sometimes called parenthetical references. They refer to specific ideas, facts, data, opinions, or quotes in the body of your paper. You should use the American Psychological Association format for parenthetical references. Examples of appropriate use of this format are given below. More can be found in the APA style manual (p. 168).
Example: Several investigators (e.g., Steele, Bass, & Crook, 1999) have had trouble replicating a Mozart Effect, even when closely following the procedures used by Raucher, Shaw, and Ky (1993) in their original study. When the effect does occur, it may really be a result of changes in mood or arousal caused by a pleasurable experience (such as listening to music), as opposed to Mozart's music having a unique effect on cognition (Nantais & Schellenberg, 1999).
| Helpful Hint: In scientific writing the evidence is usually much more important than the author. Therefore, avoid putting the author at the beginning of a sentence, especially when beginning a new paragraph. Instead, start with the conceptual point you wish to make, and then note who the authors are. This strategy helps provide smooth transitions between ideas as you move from one sentence to the next. |
AVOID: Forgas and Bower (1994) showed that mood affected causal attributions.
INSTEAD: Mood can affect causal attributions (Forgas & Bower, 1994).
1. Citing articles you haven't actually read.
This is a big mistake in scholarly work.
It's tempting to trust someone else's citation of an article. If they cited an article to make some point, why shouldn't you cite it to make a similar point? Because they may have made an error, because their description of the findings or theory may be misleading, or because you may have misinterpreted their statement of the original finding.
It's like that "telephone" game you played as a kid, where one person whispers a message to their neighbor, and then they pass it on through a chain of people, and at the end of the chain the last person reports the message they heard. The message may start out as "Pavlov's dogs are always found salivating" and end up as "Place your dollars in the ground for safe keeping".
2. Frequently citing textbooks.
While your professors may not mind if you cite a textbook once in awhile, keep in mind that textbooks are secondary sources with only summaries of primary literature. Go to the original source to avoid all the problems listed in #1 above!
3. Over-reliance on secondary citations.
Secondary citations are used when you can't find the original source, the original source is in a different language or out of print, or the original source is unavailable for some other reason. If, for example, Jones' 1979 work is out of print, you might cite the article as you saw it cited in Cortes' article in 1995. (The format for the secondary citation would be: Jones, 1979, as cited in Cortes, 1995). You should not use secondary citations just because you are too lazy to look up the original source, or you can't find the article in your own campus library! Chances are that the articles you need are easily accessible through Interlibrary Loan, and it will just take you a few more days to find them. In professional circles it is generally bad form to use a secondary citations because it means you haven't read the primary source, so you are subject to all the dangers of #1 above.
4. Using too many web sources and/or websites that are inappropriate for the assignment.
It's rare that you would use websites as sources in scientific writing. Although there are some exceptions, for most scientific writing you would have NO web sources in your reference list.
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