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.