Queries About American Psychological Association (APA) Citation-Style

¶ … queries about American Psychological Association (APA) citation-style writing as well as the general form, function and requirements behind what are known as peer-reviewed journal articles. To be specific, the author if this report will analyze the criteria for peer-reviewed journal articles, the author will analyze the importance of peer-reviewed journal articles, the author will analyze the appropriate use of non-peer-reviewed articles and the author will evaluate the subject of academic writing.

Per the CUNY Lloyd Sealy Library website, there are several criteria that exist when it comes to a peer-reviewed article. They are as follows: The author of the journal article must submit the article to the journal editor who will then forward the article to experts that exist in the field. These other experts in the field are chosen because they are the "peers" of the author who wrote the article under review.

The peers who are sent the article will review it on an impartial basis for validity, reliability and so forth If need be, the reviewers of the article will offer revisions or suggestions. If the article is below standards, they will reject it outright (CUNY, 2015). There is a reason and a science behind this process. Indeed, it is important to have peer-review when it comes to journal articles because it helps prevent non-scholarly articles from making it into "academic" pieces of work (Angelo, 2015).

Indeed, there have been studies that have been published in journals but have later been actively been disproven or recanted and a lot of those should never have been published in an academic journal to begin with. A famous example would be the now-retracted study that asserted that there was or may be a link between vaccines and the development of autism.

That study being out there and accepted as at least potentially true was quite damaging because many people (mostly younger ones) believe that vaccines should be the choice of the parent when it is clear to medical professionals around the world that not getting people vaccinated leads to disease breakouts that are entirely and completely preventable. That study getting journal-published is not the only reason this is happening but it is certainly one of the reasons the problem exist (CNN, 2015).

When it comes to the use of journal articles that are not peer-reviewed, people that are using those articles for research and such should be careful. They need to understand that while the owners of the journal are not likely in the business of posting and publishing fraudulent information, there is the chance that the people publishing the article were sloppy, were biased or otherwise printed something that is simply not true or factual.

When it comes to academic writing, and especially when using material that is not peer-reviewed, it is best to pull a group of sources and see where there are correlations and intersections in the data sets. If there are clear contradictions, these must be analyzed or at least identified as being present (UWRF, 2015). Conclusion To be fair, the peer-review process is not exactly free from potential bias itself but there are ways to combat those issues such as the author's name not being visible and.