APA Style Guide Update – 2009

Thank you to the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list (and to Debashis ‘Deb’ Aikat, Ph. D., Associate Professor and Media Futurist
School of Journalism and Mass Communication at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for posting it to the list), there will be a “6th” edition of the APA guidelines – which will include the following:

Key to the “sixth edition” of APA style is a Web presence. On July 1, 2009, APA will launch a fully revamped website featuring tutorials, sample papers, frequently asked questions, an APA Style blog, and
other resources about APA Style.

The sixth edition of APA Style offers new and expanded instruction on publication ethics, statistics, journal article reporting standards, electronic reference formats, and formats for tables and figures.

Some select features include:
~~ “new ethics guidance on such topics as determining authorship and terms of collaboration, duplicate publication, plagiarism and self-plagiarism, disguising of participants, validity of instrumentation, and making data available to others for verification;”

~~ “significantly expanded content on the electronic presentation of data to help readers understand the purpose of each kind of display and choose the best match for communicating the results of the investigation, with new examples for a variety of data displays, including electrophysiological and biological data;”

~~ “consolidated information on all aspects of reference citations, with an expanded discussion of electronic sources emphasizing the role of the digital object identifier (DOI) as a reliable way to locate information;”

~~ “simplified APA heading style to make it more conducive to electronic publication;”

~~ “new guidelines for reporting inferential statistics and a significantly revised table of statistical abbreviations;”

See more details at http://books.apa.org/books.cfm?id=4200066