There was quite an uproar at work today.
We received an email from the subject librarian in the Science Reference today stating that the APA Publication Manual was riddled with mistakes and falsehoods. I remember ordering 8 copies of this style guide on Amazon earlier this year for reference desks all around BYU campus. It turns out that there was about 30 pages of errors in this book, mainly having to do with the placements of commas, how to cite URL's, when to use brackets or parenthesis, and so on.
Anyway, students and professors alike at acedemic instituitions across the nation were justifiably angry with the quality of the manual, so much so that the APA decided to recall all of their books and republish them, all on their own tab. I can't even imagine how much that will cost them.
So my boss sent me to the different reference desks in the BYU Library to pick up these manuals, but there was one missing. Turns out that a student checked it out. I hope he/she realizes that there are some issues with it before he/she turns in his/her research paper. (I hate that there is no neutral third-person pronoun in the English language.)
If you want to read an article about this issue, look here. It also has a list of all the corrections that were made. Some of them are pretty ridiculous.
4 comments:
Yeah! We had a big discussion about this in my class! My professor didn't realize the manuals were printed wrong and neither did we, so it was all confusing. Glad I didn't buy a copy yet!
Just goes to show that humans are, well, human. I've always wondered why each group has their own specific set of guidelines for references in publications. Maybe this is something you will learn in your research, Lisa.
Two things:
1) I am not a subscriber so I can't read the article.
2) The URL made me giggle
Oh man. That is a huge HUGE deal. I bet so many people got fired. Also, yes, the URL is pretty perfect.
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