APA 6th

APA is the acronym for the American Psychological Association. It is the label given to a protocol for the formatting of references and texts in scholarly writing and, in your case, postgraduate assignments. There are literally hundreds of these protocols or ways of formatting references in texts and the texts themselves.

There is a lot of help and advice online for using the APA style. Griffith has a good collection and a Google search for APA referencing will pull up quite a number of useful sites, e.g.:

Murdoch William College Libraries Purdue Online Writing Lab
Mesa Community College Simon Fraser University

Librarians are wonderfully helpful folk and there are literally dozens of excellent sites that explain well the use of the APA 6th style of formatting.

If you are using EndNote there is a small issue with citing journal articles and the use of a DOI. APA 6th requires you to use a DOI1 if one is available and not a URL. The workaround is to use different reference types in EndNote: if a journal reference has a DOI you use the journal article reference type. If it has a URL and no DOI you use the electronic article reference type.

You will find plenty of EndNote tutorials2 on YouTube. There is also a set of tutorials on the EndNote site as well.

The Auckland University of Technology library have an excellent [www.aut.ac.nz/library/?a=108073 pdf] that walks you through using APA 6th with EndNote. It is generally useful as a reference for APA 6th as well.

A few small points.

  • When you use et al, it is short and Latin for et alia, so the al needs a period, i.e. et al.