Evaluation of a Reference List

Scientific research is a systematic, controlled, empirical and dynamic process which is undertaken in an attempt to achieve either one or two goals: producing knowledge and solving a problem (Sampieri, Collado & Lucio, 1998). When writing research articles (RA), sources must be documented and acknowledged properly in order to avoid plagiarism and to give credit to the work being reported. The American Psychological Association (APA) establishes a series of rules that should be followed to comply with the requirements of academic writing.

According to the APA (2010), electronic documents should be cited and included in the reference list as any other type of source by stating author and date. It is also necessary to refer to the retrieval statement to know the date the information was retrieved, and to mention the name of the source.

However, when examining RAs it is possible to see that sometimes authors do not follow some of the conventions above mentioned. Academic life may pose a challenge to those interested in engaging in research work. In the context of academic literacy, it is imperative to understand that the practices involved in it are not the product of individual work but of social construction. Complying with the rules and conventions that govern academic writing is of utmost importance to become a member of the discourse community which, as Swales (1990) explains, is a group joined together by the establishment of goals common to all its members, and is also characterised by the use of a defining genre.

This paper aims at analyzing three electronic resources included in the reference list of an RA. It is expected that a detailed examination like this one provides some insight into APA’s rules for reference lists and contributes to expand readers’ knowledge on academic writing.

The APA (2010) explains that when the author of a source is unknown, it should be listed by its title in the reference list. Quotation marks should be included in the in-text citation but not in the reference list. As regards capitalization, only the first letter of an article’s title should be capitalized and not all longer words, as is the case of journal titles. The first of the three sources mentioned in this reference list has no author. Although the title is presented first in compliance with APA’s conventions, all major words have been capitalized, so that the source reads “´Blueprint Lays Out Clear Path for Climate Action.`” Moreover, the title has been written between quotation marks, deviating from the rules.

The APA (2010) also states that, when authors are known, sources must be listed by the authors’ last names, followed by their initials. Example references two and three deviate from this rule by including the authors’ full names, in this way: “Clinton, Bill” and “Dean, Cornelia.” Also in these two cases, article titles have been enclosed within quotation marks and all major words have been capitalized, not complying with academic conventions. As, in the second source, “´Clinton on Climate Change`” can be read.

Immediately after the authors’ names, the date of publication should be written between brackets and followed by a period. None of the three examples analyzed in this paper follow this convention. The APA (2010) manual also recommends “providing a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), when it is available, as opposed to the URL. DOIs are an attempt to provide stable, long-lasting links for online articles” (Reference list: Electronic sources, para. 4). The three references examples fail to provide either the DOIs or URLs of the web pages consulted.

Even though the examples present their corresponding retrieval dates, the legend “retrieved from” has been omitted in all three cases. This signaling phrase points readers to the place where they can find the source cited in the article. The second and third references, on the other hand, refer to newspaper articles. The title of the newspaper has been correctly italicized and capitalized, but it appears duplicated and with different format, as in “New York Times. New York Times, 22 May 2007” (third example). The same deviation can be observed in the first reference. Moreover, the second reference does not include the author of the newspaper article first, but the name of the person interviewed in the article, which should not be mentioned in the reference list.

All in all, it can be seen that the reference list under analysis portrays serious deviations from APA’s standards and rules. Revision and a deeper understanding of the conventions are needed in order to comply with the requirements of academic writing. Not doing so might prevent the writer of such references from belonging to the discourse community of academic research and production. 

  

References 

American Psychological Association (2008). Publication Manual (5th ed.). Washington, DC: British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

American Psychological Association (2010). APA formatting and style guide. Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

Sampieri, R.H., Collado, C.F., Lucio, P.B., Pérez, M. de la L.C. (1998). Metodología de la investigación. McGraw-Hill

Swales, J.M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings (Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Comparative Analysis of Abstracts in Specialized Journals

María E. Casinelli and Clarisa A. Dornes

Universidad CAECE

Abstracts are formal summaries of finished research papers (RPs) and research articles (RAs). They are descriptive, as they describe the main text of an RP or RA, and expository, as they tend to provide information clearly and concisely. According to Hubbuch (1996), abstracts are “brief summaries of the major points made by an author in a book or article” (p.126). Similarly, Swales and Feak (1994) claim that RP abstracts “consist of a single paragraph containing from about four to ten full sentences” (p. 210). The American Psychological Association (APA, 2008) states that abstracts “allow readers to survey the contents of an article quickly” (p. 12). Swales (1990) and Swales and Feak (1994) explain that there are different kinds of RP and RA abstracts: informative and indicative, structured and unstructured. As regards linguistic features, these authors specify that abstracts are characterized by the use of full sentences, past tense and impersonal passive, the absence of negatives, and the avoidance of abbreviation and jargon. Concerning tense usage, they state that conclusions tend to be written in present, opening sentences in present or present perfect, and sentences describing results usually show tense variation.

Hubbuch (1996) and Swales and Feak (1994) are among the most renowned researchers and scholars who have analysed the structure of abstracts in academic papers. However, it is doubtful whether many academic abstracts have been compared across fields. 

It is imperative for student writers to learn how to write abstracts properly, following academic conventions. A good abstract can enable them to effectively attract readers to continue reading their productions. The present paper aims at providing a comparative analysis of four different abstracts, two from the field of education and two from the field of medicine. It is expected that an analysis like this one will enhance students’ knowledge on the writing of academic abstracts.

The analysis of the abstracts from the two articles on education, one by Wang and Smith (2013) and another one by Winke, Gass and Sydorenko (2010), revealed that both abstracts are informative, as they describe what the researchers did, and unstructured; i.e., they consist of one long and unbroken paragraph. They follow the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussions) formula but, contrary to APA’s (2008) conventions, they were not published on a separate sheet between the title and the first page of the body of the paper. This deviation may be explained by the fact that these are RAs and not RPs and, as such, changes in format may be due to publishing restrictions. The APA (2008) also stipulates that the word “Abstract” be centred and unformatted; a convention which has not been respected in these two RAs since both abstracts lack a heading. Another inconsistency found is that none of the abstracts has been double-spaced. However, the linguistic specifications described by Swales (1990) and Swales and Feak (1994) can be clearly observed in the two abstracts of the education RAs: full sentences, past tenses, impersonal passive, absence of negatives and avoidance of abbreviations and jargon. Wang and Smith (2013) have followed the general trend on tense usage strictly as the results section of their abstract presents tense variation and the conclusion has been written in present, as it can be observed in the sample sentence “Our study also instructs us of the necessity to empower the students in some form of materials development, as students themselves are best placed for knowing their learning preferences” (p. 129). Winke, Gass and Sydorenko (2010), on their part, have decided to write the whole abstract in the past tense.

The analysis of the abstracts from the two articles on medicine, one by Cooper et al. (2011) and the other one by Deveraux et al. (2014), disclosed that both abstracts are informative, as the ones found in the articles on education, since they also depict what the researchers did. However, these ones are structured, i.e., they contain bolded headings, each one identifying the main sections in the RA. This is a deviation from APA’s (2008) rule that abstracts should be a single, double-spaced paragraph, but it should be noted that the field of medicine usually follows the conventions of the Vancouver manual. Cooper et al. and Deveraux et al. also seem to have respected the linguistic conventions mentioned by Swales (1990) and Swales and Feak (1994) as regards the use of full sentences, past tense, absence of negatives and avoidance of abbreviations. Nevertheless, some jargon is used, probably because in abstracts from the field of medicine the use of specific medical terms is necessary. An example of the use of jargon is a phrase such as “Cox regression models” (Cooper et al., 2011, p.1896). It was also noticed that although impersonal passive is sometimes used, there are several examples of sentences in active voice with the pronoun We as subject, as in “We identified serious cardiovascular events [...] from health-plan data and vital records, with end points validated by medical-record review” (Cooper et al., 2011, p.1896). Concerning tense usage, both the results and conclusion sections in the abstracts by Cooper et al. and Deveraux et al. have been written in past tenses, with only one exception in the conclusion of the former, in which the first conditional is used.

A clear difference observed between the education and the medicine abstracts is the fact that the latter are heavily loaded with data supporting the results reported by the authors. Abbreviations are also used in these abstracts but they are always explained the first time they are mentioned. Of note, a second observable difference between both fields is the position of the abstracts within the RA: whereas in the medicine RAs they have been typed on a separate page, in the education RAs they appear right below the title and are directly followed by the first heading.

All in all it could be stated that the four abstracts under analysis comply with the rules described by Swales (1990), Swales and Feak (1994) and the APA (2008). They are all informative, they look to the past, they follow the IMRAD formula and they respect the linguistic features usually found in abstracts. The main distinguishing characteristic is in terms of structure: the abstracts from the field of education are unstructured but the ones from the field of medicine display a clear structure with highlighted headings. As mentioned above, the abstracts on medicine appear on a separate page whereas the ones on education are embedded into the RA as any other section, probably due to publishing restrictions, and partially deviate from APA’s (2008) standards as regards format. Despite these minor differences, it might be safe to assert that the authors of the four abstracts mostly respect the conventions of the fields they belong to. 

References

American Psychological Association. (2008). Publication Manual (5th ed.).Washington, DC: British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

Cooper, W. O., Habel, L.A., Sox, C. M., Chan, K. A., Arbogast, P. G., Cheetham, T. C.,… Ray, W. A. (2011). DHD drugs and serious cardiovascular events in children and young adults. New England Journal of Medicine. 365 (20), 1896-1904. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1110212

Devereaux, P.J., Mrkobrada, M., Sessler, D.I., Leslie, K., Alonso-Coello, P., Kurz, A.,… Yusuf, S. (2014). Aspirin in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery. The New England Journal of Medicine. [e-published ahead of print]. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1401105

Hubbuch, S. M. (1996). Writing research papers across the curriculum. (4th ed.). Harcourt Brace: Fort Worth, TX.

Swales, J.M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings (Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Swales, J.M., & Feak, C.B. (1994). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills. Ann Harbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Wang, S., & Smith, S. (2013). Reading and grammar learning through mobile phones. Language Learning & Technology, 17(3), 117–134. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/issues/october2013/wangsmith.pdf

Winke, P., Gass, S. & Sydorenko, T. (2010). The effects of captioning videos used for foreign language listening activities. Language Learning & Technology,14(1), 65–86. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol14num1/winkegasssydorenko.pdf