Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

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This book sucks. It is unorganized and does not provide enough examples. There's software and online sources available to help you.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

Currently, I am taking a course entitled "Introduction to Research in Healthcare" as a prerequisite for my radiography major. This particular manual, though not necessarily required for the course, is extremely helpful as I am in the process of putting together a literature review for the course, using the APA style format as a guideline. It is extremely thorough and easy to understand. I also was thrilled by the fact that the book had plenty of examples to go by, rather than just state the basics of, for example, a reference page. I highly recommend this book to anyone, but especially to fellow college students who are also science majors (especially in the medical field).

One star was as low as I could go! I wanted to give them a ZERO! This book must be invisible, because I've never seen it. Yes, I ordered it. Yes, I paid for it. No, it never arrived. I had to go to the campus bookstore and buy it there so I could have it for class. When I emailed to ask about the status, I got no reply. This is why people stay away from online ordering. Two out my three book orders were fabulous...this was a disaster! I will NEVER order from them again. Their reliability is non-existent.

The APA (American Psychological Association) publication manual is now in its fifth incarnation, and remains the writer's reference to the style required by over a thousand journals in psychology, education, and other fields. Those familiar with the stylistic Tower of Babel that exists in other fields, such as medicine or biology, understand this is no small achievement. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors has sought for nearly four decades to encourage medical journals to share a common style. To date about 500 have agreed to do so, while thousands (!) of others insist on their own nuances and variations. Psychologists need master just one style, a fact critics should keep in mind. The APA's style turned 80 in 2008 and shows its age. For example, it insists that "datum" is the singular form of data, usage that now seems a bit quaint. The current edition is of mixed parentage as well. The chapter on references is rewritten to accommodate sources found on the Internet, but that on the "Content and Organization of the Manuscript" is unchanged from at least the third edition (1983). Completely new with this edition is the chapter on "Manuscripts Other Than Journal Articles," an aid to preparing papers for class use or presentation at conferences.

The section on tables is so exceptional the Chicago Manual of Style even refers readers to it (CMS, 2003, p. 496). Also outstanding are the "Guidelines to Reduce Bias in Language." This is just nine pages of discussion followed by a six-page table replete with examples of poor usage and the preferred alternative. No other style guide deals with this topic in such a concise and useable fashion, a must-read for students. A chapter is devoted to profusely illustrating the page format required of articles submitted for review (what APA calls "copy manuscripts"). There is even an example of a cover letter.

Unique to APA style is the practice of referencing electronic facsimiles of print articles (e.g., in Adobe's Portable Document Format) as print sources with just the note [Electronic version] added to the title. In these areas the manual and style are thoroughly contemporary and concise. In others, such as the profuse use of periods and parentheses in references, the style again seems a bit quaint, even cluttered. Every initial is followed by a period, parentheses are placed around the date, edition number of a book, page numbers of edited volumes, and abbreviations like (Eds.) for "editors." Some sources require the abbreviation "pp." before page numbers in references, others not. No other style is so profusely punctuated. Over all, though, the coverage of reference formats is thorough and highly accessible, cluttered punctuation, nuances, and all.

Quality suffers in the sections on metrics and statistics. The style uses nonstandard symbols for some statistics, such as "M" for "mean," not the more familiar x with a bar over it (there is a table of required symbols). More troubling is that some statistics must be placed in parentheses in the text, and some not. The rules for doing this are ambiguous, and examples are sparse. Just 10 pages are devoted to this subject. In the section on the International System of Units (metric system), the manual stills notes a class of "supplementary units," a class that was eliminated by international convention in 1995, six years before this edition of the manual went to press. The point is a small one, but you wonder what else they got wrong? While the manual now has a chapter to help students prepare papers, the instructions are vague and there are no graphics to show how to format a title page or the rest of a paper. Students are well advised to seek out the "APA Crib Sheet" on the Web. The Crib Sheet interprets and illustrates these instructions for you (and your instructor!), and it's free.

The spiral-bound edition lies flat on your desk whatever page it is turned to. If you have ever worked with a conventionally bound style guide you know this is not a trivial convenience. The third edition of the APA manual was published in 1983, the fourth in 1994. The fifth edition (2001) was probably rushed to get an approved style for references to electronic sources in print. The next edition is due in 2011 or 2012 if the past is a guide. The verdict on the APA manual is a banal one, but all too true: The APA manual is what it is. A fairly recent survey of 210 journal editors found that 39% had returned papers solely for not following APA style ("The Elements of [APA] Style: A Survey of Psychology Journal Editors," by B. W. Brewer et al., 2001, American Psychologist, 56(3) pp. 266-267). If you are writing for publication, the style is too complex and nuanced not to have the manual at hand. How else will know when to "pp." the page numbers in your references?