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).