Author: Luis-Miguel Romero – Translation: Erika-Lucia Gonzalez-Carrion
Most scientific journals in the social sciences, especially the Spanish and Latin American countries, use the American Psychological Association (APA) standards to present the manuscripts. Although it is the most frequent regulation, some publications (magazines, book chapters, conference proceedings and other documents) tend to “customize” the regulations, including their own aspects or mixtures of different standards, so it is important that before begin to write the scientific product know the rules of each publication.
In July 2009 the latest version of this catalog of standards (APA 6th Edition) was published. Among some of its most important elements is the correct formula to cite by paraphrase (indirect citation) as textual (direct cite) (see image), reiterating in the standard the form: last name of author (s), year (Aguaded and Romero -Rodríguez, 2015) for indirect citations and last name of author (s), year, page (Aguaded and Romero-Rodríguez, 2015: 46) for direct cites.
One of the issues not addressed in the APA 6th Edition standards manual is the correct way to cite scientific articles that have a Digital Object Identification System (DOI), which is a technical medium to give individuality to each scientific production that owns it. In other words, there are scholarly articles – especially those from high-impact journals such as JCR or Scopus – which have an identity number inserted and which in turn is a hyperlink or web link (for example, Http://dx.doi.org/10.14201/eks20151614457). In this case, not regulated, it is recommended to operate as follows:
- Shorten the DOI: We go to the shortdoi.org link and copy the DOI hyperlink of the article that we want to shorten. The hyperlink that is copied is from the first DOI number, for example: 10.14201 / eks20151614457
- Copy the shortened DOI: We would have something like this: http://doi.org/4ht
- In the references, we cite the work, as recommended in the APA 6th Edition manual and after citing volume, number and pages, a point is placed and the shortened doi is copied (note that it is written in lower case in the quotation).
In this case, following the APA standard and the recommended DOI system, the reference would be as follows:
Aguaded, J., & Romero-Rodríguez, L.M. (2015). Mediamorfosis and disinformation in the info-sphere: Media literacy, digital and informational to the changes of habits of informational consumption. Education in the Knowledge Society, 16 (1), 44-57. Doi: http://doi.org/4ht
However, it is ALWAYS important to review the regulations of each journal, since the referencing system can change, as is the case of the Comunicar Journal, which requires DOI to be fully presented.
