APA Format

Nursing Students General Students

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Can anyone tell me what they have found most helpful for APA? Do you also have to write in APA for the DB?

Thanks

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.

Purdue OWL as mentioned above is excellent. If permitted by your school (some do consider the use of APA software as academic dishonesty), PERRLA is good as well.

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Thank you ,I will look at both of those

.

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I have used EndNote for several years. Although more expensive (~$100 academic edition), and primarily a reference manager, it does have a cite while you write plug in for MS Word. If you use the cite while you write option while completing your morificecript, you can easily convert from one style to another. This might not seem much, but if you wanted to submit a morificecript that you wrote using APA and need to reformat in AMA, this is a huge time saver. Also, after downloading your citation to EndNote and creating the record, you can attach the article to the record.

In addition to EndNote, I have used two others citation manager programs and there were small discrepancies in how your references were formatted. While I have never used PERRLA, I would not be surprised to find issues there as well.

Another option would be to create a template in whichever word processing application that you are using. You should be able to use the APA Style Guide to Electronic References, Sixth Edition to format most of your citations and reference list.

ETA: If by DB you mean discussion board, this will depend upon your program. In my program, all discussion board entries were cited and referenced in APA style.

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Specializes in ICU.
Purdue OWL as mentioned above is excellent. If permitted by your school (some do consider the use of APA software as academic dishonesty), PERRLA is good as well.

I'm confused as to how it would be academic honesty? I was wondering for future reference. As they only really give you the rules for APA and it's much easier to understand than the American Psychological Association website.

I know if I decide to go for my BSN I will have to write some papers and I would never cheat but I always use Purdue Owl.

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I'm confused as to how it would be academic honesty? I was wondering for future reference. As they only really give you the rules for APA and it's much easier to understand than the American Psychological Association website.

I know if I decide to go for my BSN I will have to write some papers and I would never cheat but I always use Purdue Owl.

There was a previous thread in which this was discussed. I don't believe it was the Purdue site, as much as the use of the PERRLA. Regardless, it didn't make much sense to me then, and still doesn't.

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Specializes in ICU.
There was a previous thread in which this was discussed. I don't believe it was the Purdue site, as much as the use of the PERRLA. Regardless, it didn't make much sense to me then, and still doesn't.

Oh. I've never heard of the other site. That may be why.

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.
I'm confused as to how it would be academic honesty? I was wondering for future reference. As they only really give you the rules for APA and it's much easier to understand than the American Psychological Association website.

I know if I decide to go for my BSN I will have to write some papers and I would never cheat but I always use Purdue Owl.

It's not the use of Purdue OWL that's the issue. PERRLA is software- it basically formats your paper and references for you. All you have to do is type the body of the paper. Some schools view the use of such software programs as academic dishonesty because the student isn't learning how to use APA format.

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...Some schools view the use of such software programs as academic dishonesty because the student isn't learning how to use APA format.

Not that I doubt you, but I found this odd. Formatting the paper itself is tedious rather than difficult. Further, most aren't going to use more than A handful of reference formats; again, not difficult, but tedious. You would think the schools would rather the students concentrate on content, rather than form.

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Thank you so much for your help

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