The Applications of APA styles in African Academic publications: An Evidence from Bahir Dar Journal of Education

Abstract

Having skimmed through recently published articles of Bahir Journal of Education (BJE), I inadvertently engrossed with a few imperfections that are incompatible with a currently in use publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) style. Notwithstanding strong efforts have been made to produce high-quality articles in terms of contents, methodological approaches and scientific credibility, the oversights of very technical details of specific APA style and formatting have been found. From professional points of views, these oversights might certainly affect the quality of the journal. The main objective of this paper is to uncover the frequent errors that overlooked within the articles since 2014, and thereby to conquer the errors using sixth edition publication manual of the APA and up-to-date manuscripts that are available at the http://apastyle.apa.org/. I presented a series of errors observed in seven randomly selected articles regarding the titles, abstracts, citations, methods, statistical presentations and lists of reference entries to take viable measures that tackle the errors virtually. Finally, based on the observed mismatches, I forwarded implications for the quick use of publication manual of APA that could support the authors, the reviewers and the examiners of the journal articles.

Keywords: BJE; APA styles; publication manual; oversights; frequent errors

DOI: 10.7176/IKM/9-2-01