GUIDELINES IN WRITING MANUSCRIPT

Prof. Felicidad T. Villavicencio, EdD, PhD

APA Style
In Psychology, authors use the guidelines that appear in the Publication Manual of the
American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2010), commonly
just called APA Style. Research reports in psychology usually include six sections, as shown in
Table 1 (Beins & Beins, p. 4)
Table 1
Typical Sections in an APA-Style Research Report
Section of the report

What the section contains

Title page

The title of the paper; the names of authors, and the affiliations of the
authors
A brief overview of the entire project of about 150-250 words
The background and logic of the study, including previous research
that led to this project

Abstract
(Introduction and
Review of Related
Literature) not written
Method
Results
Discussion
References

Minute details of how the study proceeded, including descriptions of

participants, measures (instruments), and what researchers and
participants actually did during the study
A detailed statement of the statistics and other results, of the study
What the results tell us about the study
Where to find the work cited in the paper that relates to the present
study

The Abstract
Your abstract should be a very concise description of your research objectives, your
methodology, your results, and your conclusions. The purpose is to give the reader a quick, but
good, sense of your project before reading the entire article. An Abstract should reflect the most
important aspects of your manuscript. It should also be self-contained; that is, a reader should be
able to understand everything you say without having to refer to the article itself. In addition,
you should use the present tense of verbs that relate to your conclusions, but past tense for
describing what you did and what happened. In the abstract, you should use active voice verbs
while you avoid first-person pronouns (e.g., I or We). The abstract is the only section of your
paper in which you may not use first-person pronouns; such use is permissible in all other
sections. For manuscripts that deal with empirical research, the abstract should be between 100
and 200 words in length.

The abstract should contain the following elements:

the research question/objectives
the participants profile
Dr. Felicidad T. Villavicencio - Professor 1

the method
the research results
conclusions and implications of your results

The Introduction
The introductory section provides a blueprint for the ideas you are developing in your
paper. Your job in this section is to

identify your topic (i.e., what are you doing?)

to discuss what psychologists already know and dont know about the topic and to
explain how your research will advance our knowledge even further (i.e., why are you
doing it?)
to provide the logic of your hypotheses (i.e., what do you expect to happen?)
you should try to accomplish these goals while engaging the reader with clear and cogent
writing (why it is interesting?)

In this section, you are also supposed to present ideas that are based on data and theory,
including conflicting views of different researchers. In short, you should avoid simply listing a
number of studies, describing each one as if it were unrelated to the others. The task is to make
it easy for the reader to understand how all of the studies interrelate (Beins & Beins, 2001,
p.109).
The Method Section
This section provides your reader with a detailed picture of exactly what you did. It is
oriented more toward technical details and much less toward the subject matter of your study and
it serves two basic functions. First, it allows readers to evaluate how well your methodology
answers your research question and leads to your conclusions. Second, the description of your
methodology provides other researchers with the information they need to be able to replicate
your study (Beins & Beins, 2001, p.119).
Participants
You should include participant characteristics that relate to your research hypotheses. Usually,
demographics such as gender and age (range, mean and standard deviation) of participants are
important in describing the profile of participants. Other information (e.g., ethnicity, income)
can be included if socio-cultural background is relevant in describing the participants.
Measures
You have to examine and report the reliability of the scale that you used, give sample items, the
number of items per factor and other descriptive statistics and measures of validity.
Procedure
You should specify the sequence of steps associated with the data collection, including what the
researcher does and what the participants do. This information combines the actual procedures
with the materials or instruments.
Dr. Felicidad T. Villavicencio - Professor 2

The Results
The main point of the Results section is to let the readers know what happened. Start this
section with the most interesting, important, and surprising results. You should present as much
detail as required in order to inform the reader adequately. You should present significant results
that something interesting was found. If your data analysis reveals an unexpected, significant
result, it is probably worth mentioning. But minimize attention devoted to insignificant results.
Such results let the readers know that something did not happen, and there is no need to explain
why it did not happen.
Be able to present the results in the elements of procedure previously cited from content domain
search up to the final version of the scale.
The Discussion Section
In this section, you are expected to tie together all the information in the previous
sections of your research paper. The Discussion section revisits the basic concepts of interest to
you and how you addressed your research questions; this section also shows how your results
supported your ideas. Finally, the Discussion allows you to speculate on what you think your
data are telling you (Beins & Beins, 2001, pp. 153-159). The following components are integral
in Discussion section.

Summarizing your results

Connecting different aspects of your results
Connecting the results with those of others
State the importance and implications of your results
Acknowledging the limitations of your study

References: Citations in the text and the reference list

In this section, you need to present the citations for previous work to which you have
referred. When you cite previous work, you are documenting the flow of ideas from one thinker
to another. The references you use tell your reader what path you took to arrive at your research
question and your conclusions. This section deals with the way you refer to citations in your
writing and how you list them in the References section.
So if you mention a book, a book chapter, a journal article, or any other source, you should
include that source in your References section. If you do not mention a source in your paper, do
not include it among the references. In other disciplines, a paper might have a Bibliography that
contains work not cited in the paper, but psychologists only include in the References the sources
they actually mention in the paper.

Dr. Felicidad T. Villavicencio - Professor 3