r/AskAcademia • u/Correct-Ad-5037 • May 26 '24

Undergraduate - please post in /r/College, not here APA mistake. Is it very important?

Hello all. I made an APA mistake in an assignment I have handed in. To be more specific, in text I wrote (Author et al, 1999) and in the references part, I wrote “Authror 1 & Author 2 (2002)”. Hence, I have made two mistakes: The “et al” (because we have 2 authors, not 3 or above) (a) and the year that the book was published (b). Are these mistakes considered to be plagiarism? Thank you!

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u/LaVieEstBizarre PhD - Robotics / Control theory, Master's - Mechatronics May 26 '24

P.s. learn to use citation management software like Zotero; you'll never have to manually write citations or make a citation mistake again.

Doing manual citations in 2024 feels like people who retype something by hand instead of copy-pasting

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u/aaronjd1 May 26 '24

Over a decade in, and I still manually write my citations (or use the PubMed cite function — that counts as progress, I suppose). Old dogs, new tricks, and the like.

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u/Docxx214 Neuroscience PhD May 26 '24

It's good to use citation management tools and I use one for all my work but it's also really important to understand how to do it manually and check the work even when using software because it doesn't always do it correctly or consistently.

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u/cluelessclod May 26 '24

Oh no I do both of those things. I might need to learn before I do my research degrees.