Timeline for Why/how APA was chosen as a standard for many fields?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 19, 2021 at 1:07 | vote | accept | TrivialCase | ||
| Aug 3, 2019 at 9:05 | comment | added | jnanin | It might also be that it originates more from "adopting the author-date system" rather than "adopting the psychology's style", which may shift the question a bit. | |
| Aug 2, 2019 at 20:05 | answer | added | Mark D Worthen PsyD | timeline score: 7 | |
| May 6, 2019 at 22:09 | comment | added | TrivialCase | Incidentally I asked the question because my colleague was expressing frustration with having to submit to a communication journal using APA. Apparently it is difficult for them to properly cite some of the materials they obtain (maybe via scraping? I didn't ask enough follow up questions). Of course I found this as no surprise as the needs of the two fields would likely be different. This is when I was told that it is a common format in many journals, and when I learned that no one seems to know why. | |
| May 6, 2019 at 22:07 | comment | added | TrivialCase | I had heard of MLA style but not Chicago, thank you. It still seems odd that so many different areas use a style developed for one specific field (especially if they arrived at it's use independently) and that the history of this use is so poorly documented, but I guess it's just something that no one kept track of. | |
| May 6, 2019 at 16:43 | comment | added | Jon Custer | Another standard for style is from the Modern Language Association (MLA), more commonly for English departments. They were founded in 1883, and their first style guide dates to the 1960's (perhaps even earlier). The American Institute of Physics published their first style guide in 1951 to uniformly cover all their journals. | |
| May 5, 2019 at 23:36 | comment | added | Anyon | @TrivialCase They weren't first to write a style guide - they were predated by the Chicago Manual of Style for example. However, I think they were early to focus on compact citations and objective language, which made the style useful for scientific fields mainly communicating through journal articles. | |
| May 5, 2019 at 23:36 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | No, I don't have references or evidence, it's just a guess - but maybe it will help suggest what to look for. I guess it should be noted that "a field adopting APA" is not really a single action - it would consist of individual societies, journals, departments, etc, within a field deciding to follow those guidelines, until at some point it looks like a consensus. | |
| May 5, 2019 at 22:17 | comment | added | TrivialCase | @NateEldredge so then from a historical perspective, they did it first and the needs of other fields (mostly humanities and social science I guess) are a subset of the psychology literature? Do you happen to have a reference? I'm having troubling finding a definitive narrative of other fields adopting their standard | |
| May 5, 2019 at 18:38 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | I always assumed that APA saw the need for a standard style and created one, and then other fields simply adopted APA's style because it was good enough and less trouble than creating their own. | |
| May 5, 2019 at 18:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackAcademia/status/1125097839309283331 | ||
| May 5, 2019 at 16:06 | history | edited | Wrzlprmft♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 2 characters in body; edited tags; edited title
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| May 5, 2019 at 15:00 | review | First posts | |||
| May 5, 2019 at 15:05 | |||||
| May 5, 2019 at 14:56 | history | asked | TrivialCase | CC BY-SA 4.0 |