Quite a straightforward example here by Balagura, Saul. We have the paper name:
"Influence of osmotic and caloric loads upon lateral hypothalamic
self-stimulation." We have the quotation marks. That means it's an article. It's inside
the journal-- Journal of comparative and physiological psychology. We have the
volume number and the number. We're using commas here.
We have the year 1968, and we have the page number, pp, a 325- 332. So
that's actually looking pretty good, isn't it?You can see the problem though is in the
capitalization of the article name and also the capitalization of the journal
name. This is following the APA style, but we want the MLA style, which is quite
different, which is going to use the source capitalization such as this here.
We can see that's a key point. Now, I just want to remind you
capitalization it's quite difficult. You cannot really guess at it. I did go over
some rule of thumb that we can use the first word, the last word, words
that are after the colon, and then nouns and pronouns.But you know it's very hit and
miss even. You really need to go back and look at the source to see how do they
capitalize. That's the best way. So once again, we end up with this situation of
we need to have the source material and not just guess. Guessing is the worst thing
we can possibly do.
We have another example, "Hraba, Joseph and Grant, Geoffrey. "Black is
Beautiful: A reexamination of Racial Preferences and Identification."Iinside
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And we have a volume number
and issue number, a year and the page numbers. Well, here we've got some
problems we can see very clearly, isn't it? The very first problem of course is
our name for the second author. We have the name with a comma in between, which
means the surname and the given name, the first name and the last name are reversed.
But in MLA, we do not do that. For the first author, you reverse but for the
second author you do not reverse, very important. We also can see that we are
missing our pp. period there for the pages, from what page to what page. And in
MLA, you do need to have that. So that's pretty straightforward, but don't confuse
this with other style approaches, such as APA. Peterson, Steven E., et al. So what
does that all mean? We must have three or more authors. So we're going to have go
ahead and use teh et al. What is the name of the paper? Positron Emission
Tomographic Studies of the cortical anatomy of Single-Word
Processing. It's in the journal Nature. This is the volume number, and here we
have a volume number 331.60. I think dot 60 would be the issue number, and we
have the date and the pages. Now, the problem here is inside the MLA, we're
very clear volume number is one number issue number is
another number. So that 60 needs to be separated, and then put in no., number.