Publication Style Guides

Publication Styles

There are several different publication styles that scholars can use to guide their writing process, each of which has its own style guide. The citation style and its associated style guide are often determined by the scholar’s academic discipline. Scholars from the communication field primarily use one of four citation styles. The American Psychological Association (APA) citation style is a common standard of writing guiding research in the behavioral and social sciences, including communication, psychology, and education. The APA rules and guidelines are detailed in the sixth edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2009). This style manual provides standard information on general writing conventions as well as other more technical writing details, such as in-text citations, list of references, and the presentation of statistics, tables, and figures. The Chicago style is another writing system used in the field and is typically preferred by scholars studying business, history, and art history. The style manual entitled The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.; 2010) is unique in that bibliographic information is often cited in endnotes and a bibliography page. The Modern Language Association (MLA) publishes two authoritative explanations of a third set of writing style guidelines: the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.; 2009) and the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (3rd ed.; 2008). The MLA style manual offers examples of the general MLA format for research in the humanities.[Page 1366] Finally, the American Medical Association (AMA) style is commonly used when reporting research from the fields of science and medicine. The 10th edition of its manual, AMA Manual of Style: A Guide for Authors and Editors (2007) contains information about the general stylistic writing conventions discussed in the other style manuals, as well as other writing elements specific to science, including measurement, quantitation, and the presentation of technical information.

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