In preparation for my MBA this coming July 13, I read through the course materials given before hand to know what to expect from the subjects that I have taken. One thing common to all course materials is the suggested referencing system APA to be used in all footnotes of any research paper required in all subjects. So I researched on what is APA and how is it done.
APA style (also know as Harvard style) originated from the American Psychological Association. The referencing style is widely use in social sciences for research and thesis writing. The rule of the APA style is simple, one has to put the Author and the date of the reference in the body of the written work inside a parenthesis. At the end written work the complete source should be indicated in the bibliography or notes.
The Basic example of this APA style guide is;
According to the strategy of Polarity (Krippendorf, 2005)…..
There are instances however that the author is the subject of the sentence, if this is the case we only put the year inside the parenthesis. In this example we should put the details of the reference at the end of our work. Working with this Example,
Krippendorf, K. (2005). The Art of the Advantage: the 36 strategems to seize competitive edge. Boston, Ma.
I find this system simple. The APA style gets intricate with situations such as multiple authors, multiple publications, online source etc. However, such intricacies should not discourage the researcher in religiously giving detailed references of his/her work because this is essential not only to the professor but also to the other students that might read your work therefore maximizing the understanding on the subject discussed in the paper.
For reference one can research more about APA on the net.
