How to Write a Strong APA Research Paper: Tips and Examples
If you're working on a paper for school the one thing you want to ensure is that you get your citations correct. You want your paper to look professional, but if for example, your margins are off, or you don't have the proper heading, or you don't cite your references correctly, your professor could take off a lot of points.
That's why we recommend that you go online and look for websites like:
- Citation Machine: You can actually plug in your references and this will help to ensure that everything is in its proper format and wording is set up as it should be. It's not just about giving credit to a magazine that you quoted, or a newspaper. But there's a certain way that the wording has to be set up that is considered an APA format.
- Another great source of you can utilize is Cite Fast and this is a highly recommended service to use because with this particular website, you can actually take all of your citations, paste them in and it will convert them into the proper layout. Sources that you can utilize through the site include references that come from web pages, books, journals, newspapers, online videos and web actual web images.
WHAT IS APA FORMAT?
The APA style of formatting is actually a codified in the matter of the American Psychological Association. This was set up to ensure that proper credit is given to publications that produce work. Keep in mind, it’s about giving credit where it’s due - in a formal manner. When you use this, you are going to include things like the author's last, first name, the date, if there's a website, the URL, the name of the article, and the actual link to it.
HOW WILL IT LOOK?
As you do your paper, you are going to be pulling references from different areas. For example, remember that article that you read that referenced the JPMorgan housing issue, you can use that in your economics paper, but you can’t say “I found this online.” You have to cite it correctly and when you do it will look something like this:
Smith, Bob, Housing Alerts: JPMorgan Contributes to Housing Crisis, September 3, 2008, (url will go here).
Then when you actually mention it in your paper, after your sentence mentioning it, you will write something like:
...and the article points out their errors, (Smith, 2008).
That's why sites like these can help you to ensure you're using the proper format because certain professors will take points off if you don’t. Just make sure you check out one of the aforementioned services and load in your references before you finish your paper. That way you can ensure that your citations are correct and you will get the best grade!