¶ … professional or educational purposes is an accomplishment for the author. Academia largely relies on these materials created by others in order to further their own work, learn about the author's topic, and expand upon the current published knowledge. When personal material is utilized by others, it is essential that the one borrowing the information gives credit to the owner of the material.
As a result, anyone utilizing any material authored by another must utilize a form of citation to give credit to the owner. Citation is However, throughout the various career and geographical areas there are variations to the format of the citation. This paper will focus on the similarities and differences between two of the most common forms of source citation: MLA and APA.
Usage of Citation Method
The Modern Language Association was begun in 1883 as a form of collaboration for those in the scholarly arena (Modern Language Association 2004). The standards for the citation of resources in scholarly writings was the outcome of such an effort to create a standard and formal method of giving credit to the authors whose work is utilized in an academic manner. Currently, the sixth edition is available. Most usage of MLA is found in the liberal arts and humanities (Stolley 2006).
The American Psychological Association, or APA, is the source of the citation formatting style with the same name. The most common usage of APA citations occurs in the social sciences (Neyhart, Karper, & Wagner 2006). The most recent revision is the fifth edition.
Document Format
Some of the greatest differences between using the MLA and the APA styles of citation are the ways in which the documents themselves are formatted. Firstly, in MLA, there is no title page whereas the APA style does have a title page (Neyhart, Karper, & Stolley 2006). Both styles use a running header for publication purposes, but the header includes the author's last name and page number in the upper right hand corner the APA style includes the defined title for the header, which is placed in all caps on the title page (Neyhart et al. 2006). All pages for both styles should have one inch margins all the way around the page. Another difference between the two styles is that the APA formatting style often has an abstract at the beginning of the document for publication purposes which is a brief summary of the document.
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