APA Research Essay: Review of Model Paper with Literature Review

hello everyone I know this week you are submitting the final copying of your research paper for this course congratulations on all the hard work that you’ve done what I’d like to do in this video is to review a model APA research paper keep in mind that although we will be covering the APA guidelines as published in the publication manual of the APA fifth edition’ these guidelines can be adapted by any future publication magazine or journal that you submit your work to they can also be adapted by any professor any department and a school and as always whenever you present your work you are obligated to present it in the format required by that particular journal magazine discipline school department even professor so keep that in mind and let’s go over this model paper applying the general APA guidelines let’s begin with the title page and on the title page let’s first make sure that all of our page layout settings are correct click on the page Layout tab in the ribbon and then under margins click and pull down to normal and that places one inch of margins on all sides top bottom left and right and that is the proper margin settings for APA documents here are also two links that take you through all the steps of setting up your APA manuscript using Microsoft Word 2003 and Microsoft Word 2007 next I would like to look at the page header as you can see the page header is typed into the header portion of your document and it must be inserted using Microsoft words header footer commands again I refer you to the video if you need any help and accessing these Microsoft Word next let’s look at the running head which is unique to a PA the running head in a PA refers to the shortened title that will appear in the journal wa magazine after it is published the running head consists of the word running followed by the word head followed by a colon please notice that the word head is not capitalized in APA there is one space after the colon and then you are to give a shortened title not to exceed 50 characters including spaces and any symbols that may be in that shortened title next let’s look at your info block your info block appears approximately at the bottom of the top third of your paper and it consists of your main title the purpose of a main title in an APA document is to summarize what the paper is about and to do so with as few words as possible so you want to leave out extraneous words such as this experiment or the results of this experiment now if you use a subtitle in APA you must mark the boundary between your main title and your subtitle with a colon as you are seeing here following your main title is your name an APA prefers that you use your full name including your middle initial so that indexers abstractors in the future and more clearly distinguished between you and all others all of this is double-spaced in the last element that is double-spaced is your university affiliation and that is all the information that the APA manual requires are suggest for your information block again if any individual professor journal magazine requires more information please put it there next let’s look at the abstract page which is the second page of your manuscript the abstract is a 120 word summary of your entire paper APA suggests that you begin with the most important information first and that would be your papers purpose or your papers thesis followed by subsequent levels of information your main points your outcomes etc also please make sure that your abstract is not indented as usual your header footer command will be inserted automatically on this page and all subsequent pages let’s take a look at the introduction section of your paper you know as an undergraduate the introductions that you wrote probably consisted of a paragraph often but in these APA projects your introduction section would usually consist of multiple paragraphs and that’s because the introduction section in an APA research project must accomplish three purposes first it must present the problem and its background to the reader second it must state the importance of that problem or its application or import to your audience in the field in which you’re writing in third you must clearly define the purpose of your paper and what research need it is going to address in this field so let’s take a look at this introduction section as you can see the main title of your paper is repeated on the top line of this page it is also centered and it also maintains APA titled capitalization in APA all major words of a title are capitalized what does APA not consider to be major words they are conjunctions articles prepositions all words of four letters or more are capitalized let’s begin reading through this first paragraph of the introduction so that I can point out two or three things to you advances in genetic testing or identifying gene mutations or variants associated with certain diseases or conditions have sparked debates about the confidentiality and appropriate use of an individual’s medical information so here we have a clear identification of the exact problem the mapping of the human genome in text citation Collins green Guk mocker ampersand Geyer 2003 and other discoveries in the field of genomics have broad applications let’s pause here and take a look at that in text citation this source has four author’s notice that ampersands are used to join group of author’s names not toward and and the next thing to notice is that in APA in-text citations you give all of the author’s names up to five it is only after five that you use a tower or others so as you can see this entire first paragraph was devoted to a statement of the problem let’s get down to the third paragraph because here we are supposed to see a statement of purpose of the paper let’s take a look it is likely that current legal safeguards are inadequate to present genetic discrimination and health insurance coverage this paper will examine the ethical and legal issues surrounding genetic testing in the context of genetic discrimination that’s the statement of the purpose here is the research gap or need than it fulfills examination of these issues is a critical first step in confirming the need for more legal safeguards and suggesting possible solutions and that is a solid introduction section for an APA paper before leaving the central section there’s one other thing that we need to look at in regards to this in-text citation in text citation must refer to a reference citation that appears in an alphabetical list on your reference page after the body of your paper so let’s go back to the reference page let’s look under columns and see if we find an appropriate reference citation and here it is with all of the bibliographic information necessary in order to go and find that exact source now the next thing I want to look at is the review of literature and in an APA style research project the review of literature has two major purposes one is to present a snapshot not an exhaustive study but only hitting the highlights of the previous research done in this area and then the second purpose is to evaluate the research those highlights and putting those two things together achieves the overall purpose of this review of literature which is to present to the reader the state of the art the current status of the research in this particular area so let’s take a look at this review of literature as well as some of the APA styling components that go with it first let’s look at the title brief review of literature this is called a level 1 heading in APA it looks exactly like a main title of your paper and it is even centered exactly like your main title and uses title capitalization so a level 1 heading an APA looks exactly like the main title of your paper the other thing to point out is that the APA manual says that whenever you are using only two levels of headings in your presentation you should use level 1 heading and you see here the second level you should use a level 3 heading and according to the APA manual those are the two levels to be combined whenever you have two levels of headings the next thing to be pointed out about this review of literature is that it must be organized in some fashion you must look at all of the sources that you are reviewing in this section and find a way to organize them for presentation to your reader the organization can be based upon their relationships it can be based upon a set of contradictions it can be based upon the gaps that you see in the research here in this paper on genetic discrimination you can see that the literature review is being organized by a series of key questions that must be asked and defined before any kind of legislation can take place okay picking up here with our level three heading in our first question how should genetic discrimination be defined as you see this level three heading is aligned left italicized and uses title capitalization now for the paragraph underneath it let’s read ethicist and legal experts have yet to decide on a standard definition of quote genetic discrimination here in this case the quote marks are being used to distinguish the use of words as words second let’s look at the space after those quote marks in APA there is only one space in between sentences the next thing to look at is the position of that period in APA and in American printing in general periods and commas always go inside quotation marks next sentence lemke 2005 pointed out that current definitions of genetic discrimination are too diverse and lead to contrary findings Lukie parentheses 2005 close parentheses is an in-text citation in the author date style of APA hear the name Lemke was used as part of the student sentence therefore the author’s name did not have to appear inside the parentheses the other thing to point out is that APA prefers that the in-text citation go toward the front of the sentence together with a signal phrase whenever possible and a final thing to point out is that since this summary of limp key 2005 referred to the entire summary a page number was not necessary a page number is only necessary when giving a quotation in APA if a page number is available or if you wish to refer reader to a particular section in a larger study continuing with the last paragraph on this page now both of those sentences there and that you see highlighted here refer to the Rothstein study or source however only one citation was necessary because the second sentence which refers in this source was continued with the pronoun that refers to Rothstein thus the student author cleverly prevented the needless repetition of another in-text citation to wha stay on the next page I’d like to point out the importance of using synthesis in your research paper in this middle paragraph beginning with in 2003 around 900 genetic diagnostic tests were being offered i’ve liked to take your attention to the sentence beginning after collins comma 2003 now look at that paragraph where those sentences constitute clearly three-quarters of the entire paragraph but there are no in-text citations although those sentences clearly refer to many studies is that plagiarism what’s going on here what the author has done is brought together or synthesized in her own words a conclusion and insight she arrived at by reading all of those sources therefore no citation is necessary as a matter of fact praise is necessary because clearly the author is using her critical insights to bring together these reviews these summaries of these studies in order to make her important point about the need for research that she is finding by virtue of having done this review of literature as a very important use of a critical faculty which is to be expected at this level of writing okay the final thing we’re going to take a look at is your references page as we’ve already pointed out your references page comes at the end of your paper beginning after the last page on a page by itself the word references appears at the top of the page centered capitalized your references are double-spaced and mathematical order and of course the only works that can appear on a references page are the works that you actually cited in an in-text citation and the tense of your paper the other thing that I would say to you or point out to you and is the bedford bibliography we have reviewed the use of that in our class and i’d just like to say that the bedford bibliography is the only citation machine that I have found that gives 100% correct APA citations provided you select the correct source type and enter the correct information okay you’ve spent all of this semester on this one project you’ve done it upright you’ve written it in stages and you’ve taken your time and you’ve gotten feedback on each one of those stages that’s called the writing process and I hope that in your future work you will make time in your schedule to somehow build in this writing process that you have learned to produce this paper and by employing that writing process by getting feedback and each step of that writing process that’s how you’re going to produce your best writing and graduate school and beyond