When writing a paper or a scientific text, scientific sources are necessary to substantiate what is written. To this end, there are some standards of writing, the aim of which is to achieve greater clarity and better communication between the scientists of each discipline. Two very common ones are the APA Style and the Harvard Style. These standards concern structure, punctuation marks, abbreviations, the creation of tables, the selection of headings, the compilation of references and the presentation of statistical data. APA Style was developed 80 years ago by a team of professors of social sciences and aimed at establishing the above writing standards.
Types of Bibliographic References
This article – guide focuses exclusively on the way in which bibliographic references are compiled. The latter consist of two parts, the Interstitial References (P.P.) or Within Text citations and the Bibliographic References. The in-text citations are found in the main text and basically concern the data of the author and the year of publication of the source to which the reference is made. In contrast, Bibliographic References appear alphabetically, in a list at the end of the paper, with the full details of the source, so that the reader can take direction for further research. The references must also be found in the Bibliographic References and vice versa. Two cases are excluded: a) electronic communication (email) and b) the websites, which are presented only in in-Text references and not in the bibliographic ones.
In-Text Citations
In In-Text references, when the title is mentioned and if there is no author, the first letter of each word is written, consisting of at least four (4) letters (e.g. Management of Energy). These include shorter words, which can be verbs, pronouns, nouns, adjectives or adverbs (e.g. Why Economics Is Not Yet a Science). Compound words separated by a hyphen, are both written with a capital letter (e.g. Socio-Cognitive Approach and Didactic Processes of Learning of Physical and Logical-Mathematical Concepts in School). The same goes for the first word that follows a hyphen or colon (e.g. Trade: Theory, Politics, Management).
The titles of entire works (books, collections, tv programmes, documentaries or albums) are written in italics or underlined (e.g. Game of Thrones). In quotation marks are written titles of part of works (magazine articles, episodes of tv series or songs). (e.g. “This Is a Man’s World”). When a verbatim excerpt from a source is used in the researcher’s work, this passage is injected into quotes ‘. The author, the year and the pages are listed in parentheses at the end of the sentence [e.g. “The product manager is responsible for the design of the annual marketing program of each product for which he is responsible” (Panigyrakis, 2003, p.220).]
If the writings or the idea of a source are paraphrased, then the author is also mentioned in the year (and optionally the pages). (e.g. According to Panigyrakis (2003), one of the duties of the product manager is the design of the annual Marketing program for each product under his responsibility.)
References
References are entered on a separate page at the end of the main text. However, this is done by continuing on the numbering of the pages, with the special title “Bibliographic References”. The title is placed at the beginning of the page with center alignment, without quotation marks. It is also not underlined without bold or italics. The format of the list is alphabetical, double line spacing, and the font suggested is times new roman of magnitude 12.
- Each line starts with a five-space indent from the left margin.
- The names of the authors are inverted (the adjective is entered first and then the original of the name).
- Entries in the list are entered in alphabetical order, based on the adjective of the 1st author or title, if there is no author.
- In the case of articles, chapters and books, the first letter of the first word of the title and subtitle is written in capital letters, as well as that of the word that follows after a dash and a semicolon. In the case of journal titles, the first letter of each word is written in capital letters.
- The books appear in italics, as do the titles of magazines, as well as the numbers of volumes.
- In case a source title is not included in the APA style, an adjustment to the rules of the most similar source type is proposed.
Examples APA Reference
