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The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Veterinary and Animal Sciences

Library and other info sources for Vet & Animal Science students, staff and faculty.

Academic Style Guides

Academic Style Guides

An academic style guide provides a set of rules and guidelines for writing in a given discipline. They dictate how a work should look and read so that it's consistent with other work in that field. The most commonly used Academic Style Guides include:

  • APA (American Psychological Association): often used by Education, Psychology, and Sciences
  • MLA (Modern Language Association): often used in the Humanities
  • Chicago: often used in Business, Fine Arts, and History

For more information about Academic Style Guides, check out Purdue OWL's Style Guide Overview

APA style, created by the American Psychological Association, it the writing format you will encounter the most in the sciences. It is a detailed and exacting style. The Publication Manual issued by the APA is the final authority on the style, but here are some additional resources for applying the rules of the style to your work.

Explore the resources below to help you write in MLA style. 

Explore the resources below to help you write in Chicago style. 

Below are other Academic Style Guides you may encounter in your career.

Resources for writing

Academic Writing 

There are many resources available to help with academic writing. Below are a few options worth exploring:

Inclusive Language in Academic Writing

Resources to support the use of inclusive language in academic writing:

 

Books on Writing & Research

Open Scholarship and Scholarly Publishing

Open Scholarship and Scholarly Publishing

When you're ready to publish your research, you might find that the world of scholarly publishing can be challenging to navigate. We have resources here at the Libraries to support your publishing journey. Check out the Libraries' Open Scholarship & Scholarly Publishing research guide to explore a robust collection of resources and explanations of different aspects of scholarly publishing. Also take a look at the other tabs of this box for an introduction to open scholarship and scholarly publishing.

Open Access

What is open access? "By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." (Budapest Open Access Initiative Definition, 2002).

Check out UMass Amherst's Open Access Policy to learn more about faculty publications and archiving in our institutional repository. Also explore Kennesaw State University's Open Access Hub for additional open access resources and information, including educational presentations on a variety of open access topics.

Scholarly Publishing

There are several factors to consider when deciding where to publish your work. Think. Check. Submit. is an organization that helps researchers identify journals and publishers that are reputable and trusted. They have resources for publishing books and book chapters, as well as articles in journals.

Questions about research metrics? Check out the Metrics Toolkit, a resource to help scholars understand and use metrics across disciplines.

Using a citation manager

Sometimes you need to create a citation on the fly, while other times, your writing will be more complicated and involve citing several items and keeping track of sources.  For this type of work, use a citation manager.