The APA Style
APA is used mostly for quantitative results and allows describing experiments with accuracy and precision. The first reason to use it is uniformity of style that helps researchers select the key findings of articles dispensing minor points. This happens due to the fact that APA gives clear guidelines about the structure of the paper, its margin settings, font, size, page numbering, headers, charts, tables, in-text citations, spacing, and references. It requires dividing studies into sections, which facilitates navigation and allows comparing a particular work with other studies on the same topic. The style also ensures that the research is credible. Other researchers using it for their purposes can check, from which source the information was borrowed and whether it corresponds to the original. Since the paper provides all the names and titles in the reference list, other sources can be accessed and compared to the given article. Finally, the format gives directions as per using quotes, which is highly important for avoiding plagiarism.
Including sources in the reference list is only one part of the properly organized quotation process. The other important aspect concerns in-text citations that must be provided in the body of the paper. Their key purpose is to show the reader, in which part of your work the ideas are taken from someone else’s study and thereby avoid plagiarising other scholars’ ideas. It is important to remember that every reference on the list must have a corresponding in-text citation in the text. Moreover, providing in-texts makes it much easier for the audience to find the original sources and explore them for additional information. The in-text for the paper I have selected is (Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2014).
Direct Citation Examples
In order to cite the sources properly in direct quotations, one must remember that the content of the in-text directly depends on the type of the source, the number of authors, and the number of mentions in the text. My quotes will run as follows:
“In 2011-2012, the prevalence of obesity in the United States was 16.9% in youth and 34.9% in adults” (Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2014).
“Analyses of trends in obesity prevalence among middle and high school students have shown mixed results” (Ogden et al., 2014).
References
Ogden, C. L., Carroll, M. D., Kit, B. K., & Flegal, K. M. (2014). Prevalence of childhood and adult obesity in the United States, 2011-2012. Jama, 311(8), 806-814.