FYSP 096: The Art of Social Work

APA style is widely used in the social sciences. Citations are created using both a detailed reference list appearing at the end of a paper and brief in-text citations that direct readers to particular sources from that reference list. 

We are happy to help you with your citation and paraphrasing questions at the Research Help Desk or during individual consultations.

• Our full citation guide provides online resources and citation examples.
• We have copies of the major citation styles manuals at the Research Help Desks in the Libraries.
• We support two citation management software, RefWorks and Zotero, which can help you to organize your references and create your citations.

The Oberlin College Writing and Speaking Center can also assist with writing your research paper and citations. They provide assistance with writing mechanics, including citation, developing a research question or thesis, developing an argument to support your thesis, reviewing your paper for sentence-level corrections, and editing for flow and clarity.

Ways to Get Help

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, web sources, media, etc.  Each citation is followed by a brief (approximately 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited.  Annotations should not be confused with abstracts, which are summaries of content.  Annotations are both descriptive and critical.

Annotations should:

• evaluate the authority or background of the author
• indicate the intended audience of the work
• compare or contrast a work with others in your bibliography
• explain how this work contributes to your research topic

The following example annotation uses APA style (Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition, 2019) for the journal citation:

Waite, L., Goldschneider, F., & Witsberger, C. (1986). Nonfamily living and the erosion of traditional family orientations among young adults. American Sociological Review, 51, 541-554.
The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that nonfamily living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living.