Tag: Academic Writer

APA Style CENTRAL: New Year, New Name

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Librarians

APA Style CENTRAL®, the digital platform for teaching and learning effective writing in APA Style, is now known as Academic Writer™!

You may notice this new name and logo when you visit the site.

Don’t worry, there have been no changes to the accounts or papers created within the platform. Your login is the same, and all the references you’ve added and papers you’ve started are still there.

You’ll also notice a few product changes. Academic Writer will have three centers to teach and learn effective writing—the Learning Center, the Reference Center (formerly known as the Research Center), and the Writing Center.

The Publishing Center, dictionaries, and electronic reference books covering quantitative and qualitative research methods have been removed.

Browse our Training & Support pages for assistance with using and accessing Academic Writer.

Additional help for librarians, including technical information and marketing materials, can be found on our Librarian Resources page.

And, as always, you can contact APA’s Customer Engagement team for help.

APA Style CENTRAL Expert Tip: Exporting an APA Style Paper Reference List

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Librarians, For Students

Do you need to create an APA Style® reference list for sharing with your journal club, collaborating with a colleague, or preparing a course assignment? APA Style CENTRAL® can help with that!

How to export a paper’s reference list formatted in APA Style as a Microsoft Word file:

1. At the top of the screen, expand the My File Cabinet menu and select My Papers to view your list of saved papers. Open the file containing the reference list you want to export.

2. In the left navigation menu of the paper editing screen, use the arrow to expand the EXPORT menu and select Download.

3. Under the Download Paper heading, select Word (*.docx, selected by default) or PDF as the file type.

4. Use the Download Paper button to export the file.

5. The exported file will be saved in your browser’s default Downloads folder (or the location specified when saving the file).

Tip: To obtain a reference list for an annotated bibliography, begin a new paper by entering a title and then use the Add References button to immediately begin creating your reference list (see screenshot below). When you’ve finished adding references, use the steps above to export the paper as a Word file and continue working in Word to insert your annotation for each reference.

This expert tip was inspired by a question from a user like you! Have a question of your own?
Please let us know at Support@APAStyleCENTRAL.org.

Related resources:

APA Style CENTRAL® Expert Tip: Citing Personal Communication

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Librarians, For Students

The purpose of a reference list in APA Style® is to acknowledge the work of previous scholars and provide a reliable way to locate that work.

What if you want to acknowledge a source that can’t be retrieved, such as a conversation, live lecture, or private letter?

This information should be treated as a personal communication, which is cited in the body of the paper but not included in the reference list.

You can cite a personal communication in your APA Style CENTRAL® paper by clicking the Personal Communication button in the editor menu or selecting from the Insert menu.

 

 

 

Once you provide the information needed—the individual’s name and the date of communication—the citation will appear in the paper body, including the words personal communication.

 

Because personal communications can’t be retrieved by a reader, they are not included in the reference listIn APA Style CENTRAL, you can edit personal communication in the body of your paper, as you would any other text.

 

Please note:

  • Research interviews with participants are NOT considered personal communication; they are qualitative data and should be reported in a way that respects confidentiality. For more, see this post on the APA Style blog.
  • If the communication was shared with you personally but is now retrievable—the conversation is on a discussion board, the lecture can be found on YouTube or a podcast, or the letter is published in a periodical or book—you can treat it as any other reference (i.e., create a reference to that retrievable source).

 

For more information, see the APA Style CENTRAL quick guide “Personal Communications.”

Related Resources

APA Style Blog: What Belongs in the Reference List?

APA Style Blog: How to Cite a Class in APA Style

APA Style Blog: Let’s Talk About Research Participants

APA Style CENTRAL® Update: Improved Searching of Learning Center Content

Posted on by Patti Avellanet in For Faculty, For Students

The search function in the Learning Center has been improved! APA Style CENTRAL recently added features and updated tools to help with your research and writing in APA Style (also see our previous blog posts for details about spell-check and appendices and citing within paper elements).

After discovering that users were not easily finding relevant quick guides, sample references, and other content when searching the Learning Center, we updated the behind-the-scenes indexing for the learning objects to make them easier to find.

You can now enter a variety of search terms without having to exactly match the terms used in the learning object’s description or title. All of the relevant parts of the search results are highlighted in yellow. If the answer can be found in both the learning object and an associated PDF in the LEARN MORE section, both will be highlighted.

For example: Searching for “chapter” results in highlighting of the quick guide title “Book Chapter Reference”; all instances of the word “chapter” in this quick guide’s DESCRIPTION heading; the video preview box in the THUMBNAIL section; and the text in the LEARN MORE section, “APA Style Guide to Electronic References, Examples 19-20″.

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Another notable example: Searching for “Bible” will display the “Citing References in Text” quick guide, with highlighting of the relevant section of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association that addresses the citation of classical works.

Let us know! If you search the Learning Center but don’t find what you’re looking for, please email us! Tell us what search term(s) you used and what you expected to find so that we can update the content indexing to improve the search functionality.

Search tip: To quickly clear your search terms from the search box or view all learning objects again, use the “Show all items” link to the left of the search box (see screenshot above).

Related resources:

Questions? Want to see more features added to APA Style CENTRAL?
Let us know!  support@apastylecentral.org

New Features in APA Style CENTRAL®’s Writing Center – Citing Within Paper Elements

Posted on by Marta Soto in For Faculty, For Librarians, For Students

APA Style CENTRAL recently added and updated tools to help with your research and writing in APA Style. See our previous blog post for details about spell-check and appendices.

You can now cite references in abstracts, figure captions, table bodies, and table captions, in the same way you cite references in the body of the paper.

Why cite within these parts of the paper?

  • If your research is a reply or follow-up to previously published work, you’d usually cite that work in the abstract.

  • If your figure summarizes data from another published work, you’ll want to credit that researcher in the figure caption

  • If you’re doing a literature review or meta-analysis and want to summarize the results of several previous studies in a table, you’ll want to cite those studies in the table body.
  • If your table includes results you found using a concept or a survey developed by another researcher, you’ll want to credit them in your table caption.

 

 

To cite within a paper element, you can create a new reference, search for a reference in PsycINFO, or choose from My References.

Once the in-text citation is created, the reference is added to the Paper Reference List and marked as cited.

 

 

You can read the full list of platform updates on APA Style CENTRAL’s training and support page.

 

Related resources:
APA Style Blog: How to Cite Sources in a Table

APA Style CENTRAL Handout: Adding References to Papers

Tutorial: Inserting References

 

Questions?
Want to see more features added to APA Style CENTRAL?
Let us know!  support@apastylecentral.org