Psych Write: Our Cheats on APA Style in the Reference List

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When writing, consider your audience. Psychology Today magazine articles do not look like journal articles. PsychologyToday.com blog posts do not always look like items for the printed magazine, although they do look more like magazine articles more journal articles.

Previously I shared tips for writing about psychology for general audiences, in "Psych Write: Psychology Can Make Sense and Be Fun to Read!" Here, I share how we cheat on APA style and yet mostly follow APA style in our reference sections within the Popular Culture Psychology books series that I edit. Most of you may have no use for this, but I urge those writing about psychology for non-psychologists to consider some of what we're doing and why.

Our Cheats

This isn’t the place for anyone to learn how to write an APA-style reference. The American Psychological Association published an entire manual for that, and a number of websites such as the Purdue OWL can help. For the most part, we follow APA style when writing references, but we cheat on a few things for practical reasons.

• With rare exceptions, we don’t include doi (Digital Object Identifier) numbers because cumulatively they fill a lot of space with something that few, if any, of our readers will ever find useful.
• Replace "and" with an ampersand in every journal title, like this: Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. That only applies to the names of journals, not to other titles such as articles, chapters, or books. We do this because (1) the use of "and" vs. ampersand will vary greatly between journals and (2) the use will even vary within a journal. Some have "&" on the cover but "and" on their website. Occasionally one will even vary between its own cover and indicia (publication information in tiny print inside the publication). Consistently using the ampersand saves us all the trouble of looking this up and analyzing the journal title in all its permutations, and every reader will still have the same information needed to locate the source.
• We do not list movies or TV shows in the reference section because APA-style info on those will not help anybody find them. If we cite a movie or show a lot throughout the book, I’ll provide production information in a sidebar at the beginning of the book (or maybe at the end as in Star Trek Psychology: The Mental Frontier). The endnote citation will provide enough information to identify a movie for what it is, like this: Westworld (1973 motion picture).
• When citing an online article, we do not say “Retrieved from” or include retrieval date. Retrieval date is good for your own records and valuable in case a webpage changes but unlikely to help the few readers who want to check your source.
  • Abrams, N. (2017, March 25). Westworld: Which host achieved freewill in finale? Entertainment Weekly: http://ew.com/tv/2017/03/25/westworld-season-2-spoilers/. [Make sure address does not have hyperlink in the document file.]
• Because APA style does not remotely suit how people read, organize, and think of comic books and graphic novels, we cite comics so differently that I will not elaborate on them here at this time.
• When the author is the publisher, we write out the name as both author and publisher. Much as we might like to trim some space by identifying publisher as "Washington, DC: Author" instead of "Washington, DC: American Psychological Association," it's more important for this to make sense to the reader, and so we use the latter.

Changes, Not Cheats

Writers often do a couple of things that suited previous editions of the APA publication manual but not the current one (American Psychological Association, 2009).

• While it's common to identify publisher location simply by city without state when the city is famous enough, current APA style no longer does that. Instead of judging the relative fame of every city, specify both city and state (and possibly country)—e.g., New York, NY: Sterling.
• A previous edition of the APA manual dropped parenthetical issue numbers in most cases, but the current edition has resumed the practice of including them.
  Incomplete: American Psychologist, 53, 429–439.
  Correct: American Psychologist, 53(4), 429–439.

Formatting (Never Tab)

This part really isn't a cheat. In fact, it should be good instruction for anyone writing in APA style.

Do not use paragraph breaks and tabs to make your references look like hanging paragraphs when they're really not. If your manuscript goes to press, your formatting will change and make such a mess that your editor might never want to look at your work ever again.

Use hanging indents in the reference section. In MS Word, set them as Paragraph > Indentation > Special > Hanging > 0.5" (unlike these paragraphs about how to write the references). Each reference cited should be a single, self-contained paragraph. Along the same lines, you should format paragraphs in the body of your text the same way because tabs are unlikely to transfer well: Paragraph > Indentation > Special > First line > 0.5".

Endnotes

We use endnotes instead of the parenthetical citations that look weird and intrusive to most readers (e.g., Ellis & Dryden, 1990). When an endnote cites a source with three or more authors, we use "et al." every time, not just the first (e.g., Taylor et al., 1998). We back up our ideas with a lot of sources, which in typical APA style would create a lot of speed bumps to intrude on readability for the everyday reader. Superscript numbers indicating specific endnotes are unobtrusive¹ for most readers and yet they make information readily available to those who want to know how we're backing up what we say.

Sample Endnote

¹ Like this one, demonstrating what that sentence said about endnotes.

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