Redesigned APA Style CENTRAL Training & Support Home Page

The APA Style CENTRAL® Training & Support Home page has been redesigned to help you access our training materials more quickly and easily.

""We offer support in a variety of formats designed to help students, instructors, librarians, and administrators:

You can also subscribe to the APA Style CENTRAL email list (announcements only), and view the contact information for the APA Style CENTRAL Support team.

The right navigation rail enables quick access to all of these links within the APA Style CENTRAL support site in the “Training & Support” section. There is also an “APA Style® Information” section for easy access to additional APA Style resources.

Bookmark or link to the APA Style CENTRAL Training & Support home page in library websites, LibGuides, your course management system, or any other location where students, faculty, and researchers will find it.

If you have any questions about using APA Style CENTRAL, please email us or call (1-800-374-2722; TDD/TTY: 202-336-6123) — we’re here to help you!

From the Deck of… ALA Midwinter 2018

Welcome to “From the Deck of . . .” an irregular series in which we highlight search demos and other information from the slide decks we create for our live training sessions. You can view and download these materials from the PsycINFO SlideShare account.

At the recent American Library Association Midwinter conference, APA hosted a Lunch & Learn training session, which covered searchable vocabularies in PsycINFO®.

  • Keywords are searched using natural language, and are good for current research and new concepts.
  • Index Terms (also called Subject Headings) are found in the thesaurus tool, and help the focused researcher quickly find all records about a concept.
  • PsycINFO Classification Codes® describe broad areas of psychology, and are good to pair with a keyword or an index term search.
  • MeSH, or Medical Subject Headings, are assigned by National Library of Medicine, and are good for searching neuroscience and health topics, especially for researchers familiar with PubMed.

Continue reading

APA Style CENTRAL – Research Lab Book: Develop My Research Idea

Today we’d like to highlight one of our APA Style CENTRAL® handouts, “Research Lab Book: Develop My Research Idea” (PDF, 599K). Please feel free to link to this handout where students, faculty, and researchers will find it!

""APA Style CENTRAL’s Research Lab Book is a suite of tools to help you plan and document your research process. Develop My Research Idea guides you through developing a research idea that is neither too broad nor too narrow. Appropriate for use with original research or a literature review, this 5-step approach walks you through a structured framework for brainstorming your interests, identifying a specific topic, developing a research question, elaborating on the details of that question, and clarifying your expectations about the outcome of your research.

When you’re done, you’ll be ready to search for relevant literature and begin considering your study design.

Undergraduates and others who can benefit from a more structured way of formulating a research topic will find this tool helpful.

Faculty and writing instructors can also use these steps individually or in combination as Continue reading

APA Style CENTRAL – Customizing the Writing Center Display

Today we’d like to highlight one of our APA Style CENTRAL handouts, “Customizing the APA Style CENTRAL® Writing Center Display” (PDF, 565K). Please feel free to link to this handout where students, faculty, and researchers will find it!

APA Style CENTRAL’s Writing Center was designed to be flexible, offering a wealth of tools to help you manage the process of writing your paper or manuscript. Understanding that users often have different needs at different times, this resource shares how the display can be configured to accommodate your workflow preferences while you are writing your paper.

Details in the handout include:

  • Three (3) options for temporarily hiding the left navigation menu to maximize the amount of horizontal viewing space while you are working on your paper;
  • How to collapse the References pane and/or expand the Writing/Editing pane to increase the vertical display of paper text;
  • Activating full-screen mode; and
  • The “Find and Cite Reference” tool for creating an in-text citation when your References pane is hidden — or even when you just want to quickly cite your work without having to scroll down past the Writing/Editing pane to access the “References” tab.

These options can be activated while you are working on a paper. Default settings are restored whenever you exit the paper, log out, or otherwise begin a new browser session.

Want to learn more? You’ll find this handout on our APA Style CENTRAL® Handouts and Guides page, where we continue to add handouts and documentation for users and administrators as they become available.

Do you have a “how-to” question about APA Style CENTRAL or some aspect of it you’d like to know more about? Please let us know!

Webinar Alert: APA Style CENTRAL® Trainings for November 2017

 

APA Style CENTRAL® is the newest member of the APA Style® family, launched in July 2016.

APA’s training specialists have developed several webinars for librarians, instructors, and students that include a content overview and a live demonstration of features.

Click on any session link below to register.

APA Style CENTRAL Online Introduction (60 minutes) introduces librarians, faculty, and students to the platform:

Teaching with APA Style CENTRAL (60 minutes) details how faculty, librarians, and other instructors can use APA Style CENTRAL in teaching APA Style:

Writing Papers in APA Style CENTRAL (30 minutes) teaches end users how to create and save papers using APA Style CENTRAL:

For more information, including the full training schedule, visit the APA Style CENTRAL webinars page.