Summary: When writing a college research paper in the style of APA, or American Psychological Association, a reference book is useful in staying true to the rules. Write a paper in APA style, and include a works cited page, with tips from an English teacher in this free video on college research papers.
David M. Harris has taught English at Vanderbilt University and elsewhere. He has published poetry, essays, short fiction and a novel, and he has worked in book and magazine publishing.read more
"If you're writing a paper in the sciences or the social sciences, usually the style you're going to use is APA -- American Psychological Association -- and you're really going to need a reference on this. I don't have time to go through all of the hundred or more possible variations, so go to your grammar handbook, which will have this. But in general, first of all, you refer to everything in the past tense. Not "so-and-so says" but "so-and-so said or argued or stated or proved" or whatever it is. You need to know the author's name, the title of the work. If it's a book, the city it was published, the name of the publisher, the year it was published. And that's approximately the order it's going to go in. Again, this...there are slight variations and you're going to need to look it up. If it's a...if it's a journal article -- and if it's an APA paper, you're going to have journal articles, almost certainly -- author, last name, first...and first initial. In APA, we don't use the full first name, just the first initial. Title, the name of the journal, in italics or underlined, the issue of the journal, either by date or by number, however they do it, and the page number that your citation appears on. Now, that's for your work cited page. You don't put all of that in the text. We don't use footnotes anymore, either. Sometimes end notes, but that's another issue. In the text, you're going to say, "As so-and-so stated..." and then after the name -- after the author's name -- you'll put in parentheses, the date. The date is what will refer to the specific work in case there are more than...in case there's more than one work by the same author. So you cite that by the date. You can also say, "It has been shown..." -- not the best way of saying it -- and then you have the author and the date in parentheses. The main thing is that in the text, you have the author and the date so that the reader can go to your list of works cited and find the particular piece you're referring to without any difficulty and can read further if necessary."
eHow Article: How to Write an APA Style Paper
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