Biological Study Paper
Running head: ENTER PAPER TITLE ALL IN CAPS (SHORTEN IF TOO LONG) 1
5
Enter Title of Your Paper: Capitalize Every Important Word
Enter Your Name
Enter Course Name
Enter Instructor’s Name
Enter Date
Abstract
Click here to enter your abstract if required by your instructor. An abstract is a summary of your paper. An abstract should be short and concise but include the topic of your paper, the main points you are writing about, and the conclusions you reach. Include a brief sentence summary for all sections of your paper. An abstract is typically 150-250 words long. [Notice that the abstract begins at the left margin rather than indenting the first line.] To remove this content control box, right click in the box and then select Remove Content Control just below the Paste Options.
Enter Title of Your Paper Capitalizing Every Important Word
Begin your paper here. I used the tab key rather than using Word’s indent feature to make the first line of this first paragraph .5 in from the margin and that’s how you would indent each new paragraph. That way you won’t have to remember to change that set indent if you have other formatting within your paper. You can remove this box of controlled content by right clicking in the box and selecting remove content control. The References page that follows was created using the Page Break feature of Word. You can keep typing page after page and the References page will always remain a separate page at the end of your paper and will be renumbered automatically. The last pages contain more information and examples for citing sources in APA style.
References
This is where your first citation should start and the hanging indent feature will automatically indent each succeeding line as you keep typing your citation. If you accidentally delete that feature when deleting this information, place your cursor at the beginning of your citation and do a CTRL-T (that’s the keyboard shortcut for the hanging indent.)
This page is to show you an example of what your References page should look like and includes a color-coordinated description of the elements needed for a proper citation in APA style of an article found in a scholarly journal. You should delete this page and the following page from your research paper before handing it in.
Author’s Last Name, First Initial. Middle Initial if given. (Publication Year). Title of article in sentence case: Capitalize only the first word (also after a colon) and Proper Names. Title of Journal in Italics, vol#(issue#), page numbers. Digital object identifier (DOI)
Gerstl-Pepin, C., & Patrizio, K. (2009). Learning from Dumbledore's Pensieve: Metaphor as an aid in teaching reflexivity in qualitative research. Qualitative Research, 9(3), 299-308. doi:10.1177/1468794109105029
Note: this example has two authors and the second (or last) author is preceded by the & instead of the word “and.” This citation was copied directly from EBSCO’s database citation generator using the “merge formatting” paste option in Word. Look for the “Cite” option (below the email and print options) to the right once you click on the actual article in EBSCO The generator is pretty good for APA style but isn’t always 100% correct. Typical things to watch out for are:
· Proper capitalization of article title – the generator cannot determine proper sentence case so it was programmed to repeat the title as it appears in the original publication.
· Journal title – the generator tends to capitalize every word (such as “of”) rather than just the important words. Notice the Journal Title is Capitalized and in Italics.
· EBSCO includes the issue number even though it is not required by APA for journals that are continuously paginated. Check with instructor if he or she cares about that guideline.
· Magazine or Newspaper articles – EBSCO treats every article as if it were a scholarly journal article; for most other types of articles you would generally include the full date, not just the year. For a monthly magazine (2013, December). For a weekly magazine or daily newspaper (2013, December 4). APA does not abbreviated the month.
· If there is no doi (these are usually only assigned to scholarly journal articles and even then not all will have a doi), APA guidelines suggest including the URL of the home page of the journal (Retrieved from http://qrj.sagepub.com/) if you found the article electronically. Although APA doesn’t require names of databases in the retrieval statement for manuscripts submitted for publication, for student papers, giving the name of the database (Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database) is more useful to your instructor than the homepage of the journal. Always check with your instructor as to his or her preferences.
· The citation generators in the Gale provided databases vary in how accurate they are but are still pretty good.
Hitting the Enter key takes you back to the left margin to start your next citation. DISCLAIMER: These are only examples to provide some guidance for a full citation. Your citations will likely be from a variety of sources, not just academic journals. Consult the recommended APA online sources for citing other types of sources in our databases and information not found in our databases. Colors and Bold are for illustration only…