Hamilton College Guide To Documentation

HAMILTON COLLEGE GUIDE TO APA-STYLE DOCUMENTATION

This is intended as a basic guide to documentation. More complete information can be found in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th edition) in the library. The composition textbook used at Hamilton also includes a section on the use of APA style, although its treatment of electronic sources is outdated. All essays and reports written with source citation at Hamilton College will conform to APA style.

Documentation: In-text documentation is necessary for any fact, figure, quotation, or idea from an outside source. This includes paraphrased, summarized, or directly quoted material. The in-text citation appears in parentheses directly after the material to be cited and consists of the author’s last name (in the case of a source without an author, the citation is the beginning information as found in the reference list) and the page number on which the documented material can be found. Example: (Jones, 2003, p. 23) or (Report, p. 3).

Common Knowledge: Material that is considered to be common knowledge is what any reasonably educated person would know or what is provided in a majority of references used for the paper or report. Example: The beginning of the Declaration of Independence would not be cited since it is consistently found in the same form in any copy of the Declaration.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism is defined as “the false assumption of authorship; the wrongful act of taking the product of another person’s mind, and presenting it as one’s own.”

Reference List: The Reference List contains all of the outside sources used in the paper. It appears at the end of the paper as a separate sheet. The title References is centered at the top of the page. Entries appear in alphabetical order by author’s last name, or for sources without authors, by title. The first line of an entry is even with the left margin. Additional lines in the same entry are indented five spaces. Double space within and between entries.

Examples of Parenthetical Documentation and Reference List Entries

Following are some basic examples of parenthetical documentation and listing of sources in the Reference. Also included are sample citations of online sources. More information is available from the APA website at <www.apastyle.org>, from Diana Hacker's site <http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/social_sciences/intext.html>, or from the text companion site <http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite6.html>.

Sample Passage from Research Paper and Parenthetical Citation: / Sample of Reference List Entry
for this Passage:
Between 1968 and 1988, television coverage of presidential elections changed dramatically (Hallin, 1992, p. 5). / Hallin, D. C. (1992). Sound bite news: Television coverage of elections, 1968-1988. Journal of Communication, 42(2), 5-24.
Sample Passage from Research Paper and Parenthetical Citation: / Sample of Reference List Entry
for this Passage:
A presidential commission reported in 1970 that recent campus protests had focused on “racial injustice, war, and the university itself” (Report, 1970, p. 3). / Report of the president’s commission on campus unrest. (1970). New York: Arno Press.

Note: In a research paper, these would be double-spaced.

Citing Sources from the World Wide Web:

Resources from the World Wide Web that one may use in research include scholarly projects, reference databases, texts of books, articles in periodicals, and professional and personal sites. According to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th Edition), entries for Internet sources in a reference list should follow two guidelines:

1. Direct readers as closely as possible to the information being cited. Whenever possible, reference specific documents rather than home or menu pages.

2. Provide addresses that work.

At minimum, a reference to an Internet source should include

1. Document title or description

2. A date (either the date or publication or update, or the date of retrieval)

3. A URL (uniform resource locater, such as http://www.apastyle.org)

When available, the author's name should be given at the beginning of the citation.

EXAMPLES:

A Work from a Library Subscription Service:

Cooling trend in Antarctica. (2003, May-June). Futurist, 15. Retrieved October 13, 2002, from Academic Search Premier database (6510123).

A Personal Home Page:

Lancashire, I. (2002, March 28). Home page. Available from http://www.chass.untoronto.ca:8080/~ian/

Article in a Reference Database:

Fresco painting. (2002). Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Retrieved May 8, 2002, from http://search.eb.com

An Article in a Magazine:

Print version:

Levy, S. (2002, May 27). Great minds, great ideas. Newsweek, 139, 54-58.

Online version:

Levy, S. (2002, May 27). Great minds, great ideas. Newsweek, 139, 54-58. Retrieved May 29, 2002, from http://www.msnbc.com/news/754336.asp

An Article in a Professional Journal (from EBSCO):

(The access number in parentheses at the end of the citation is not required, but it does make it easy for you or your readers to find the document again.)

Holliday, R. E., & Hayes, B. K. (2001). Dissociating automatic and intentional processes in children's eyewitness memory. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 75(1), 1-5. Retrieved February 21, 2001, from Expanded Academic ASAP database (A59317972).

A Review:

Ebert, R. (2001, April 13). [Review of the motion picture Memento].Chicago Sun-Times Online. Retrieved May 18, 2004, from http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/04/041302.html

References

(NOTE: this heading is centered at the top of a new page)

Cooling trend in Antarctica. (2003, May-June). Futurist, 15. Retrieved October 13, 2002, from Academic Search Premier database (6510123).

Ebert, Roger. (2001, April 13). [Review of the motion picture Memento]. Chicago Sun-Times Online. Retrieved May 18, 2004, from http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/2001/04/041302.html

Fresco painting. (2002). Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Retrieved May 8, 2002, from http://search.eb.com

Lancashire, I. (2002, March 28). Home page. Available fromhttp://www.chass.untoronto.ca:8080/~ian/

Levy, S. (2002, May 27). Great minds, great ideas. Newsweek, 139, 54-58.

Version 1.0 3 9/23/04