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Dust Off That APA Citation Generator in Your Brain

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Hello,

I'm trying to cite results from the Home Health Compare Option on Medicare.gov as a resource in a paper. (The purpose of the paper is to report on our findings when comparing 3 home health organizations in our area using that option on the site.) I have my APA style guide pretty well committed to understanding, but I wanted some clarification. Should this kind of thing be cited as a full website would be? Do I need to add some indicator that it's a search tool within a page? I have a citation guide sitting in front of me, and nothing is jumping out...

I emailed my instructor too, but in case she doesn't get back to me today, I figured I would post here as well.

(Please feel free to ask me to clarify if that sounded like gibberish. I've got the brain drain a bit.)
 
casebro said:
Don't quote any sites, just cite the paper?
Click to expand...

It's not a paper I'm citing. See, I explained it badly.

I'M the one writing a paper. What I'm citing is this:
https://www.medicare.gov/homehealth...d=PA&loc=15210&lat=40.4083044&lng=-79.9919995

It's the results of a comparison between various aspects of 3 home health care organizations in my area. The paper we have to write is a summary of the results of those comparisons. We were specifically told to use that exact website mechanism to obtain the data. We are also told in the syllabus to include a reference page on all papers. Therefore, the instructor must be expecting us to cite these search results.

I'm not sure how the hell to do that. Instructor may not get back to me today, and I just wanted to see if I could find out.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I feel old. The last time I wrote a research paper there weren't any websites.
Click to expand...


And you chiseled your citations into stone tablets! Citing other stone tablets. We have it way too easy now.

I just had to take a Myers-Briggs test for my other class and post a video of myself talking about the results. Seriously. This is a 400-level class. And it's essentially making me do Facebook things for points.
 
isissxn said:
...

I just had to take a Myers-Briggs test for my other class and post a video of myself talking about the results. Seriously. This is a 400-level class. And it's essentially making me do Facebook things for points.
Click to expand...
If I had to do that, I'd make a video of the reasons to debunk the test.

You question makes no sense to me, not because of your post but because I don't understand the assignment.
 
Last edited:
Skeptic Ginger said:
If I had to do that, I'd make a video of the reasons to debunk the test.

You question makes no sense to me, not because of your post but because I don't understand the assignment.
Click to expand...

Understandable. It's a slightly weird assignment.

Okay, so as I'm sure you probably know, there is a function on the Medicare.gov site that allows you to search and compare different criteria about up to 3 different home health care facilities within a given geographical area. We were instructed to go to that page, type in our own zip code, and select 3 to compare under the compare option. So I've done all that, and once done, the page looks like this - https://www.medicare.gov/homehealth...d=PA&loc=15210&lat=40.4083044&lng=-79.9919995. It will probably make much more sense if you take a glance at it.

So that's my data. My paper is just to write a summary about the notable similarities/differences between organizations, if any are particularly bad or good, etc., with some examples. Based on that comparison data on the Medicare site.

In the syllabus for the course, the instructor wrote that ALL writing assignments are expected to have APA reference page/citations. This is a paper, so we must have to cite the comparison results page(s), as the whole assignment is based around that info. I wasn't sure how to do such a citation, especially in-text. Google can't understand what I mean either, lol.
 
Last edited:
Take a screencap or print out the data/table and attach then refer to the attachment?
 
Loss Leader said:
Well, I would definitely do this. I cannot imagine that a paper needs a citation when the entire assignment is the citation. However, I would cite the webpage:

Healthcare facility comparison from ZIP. (2019, March 16). Retrieved from http://https://www.medicare.gov/hom...letters-that-somehow-equal-your-search-result.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

I didn't even think of this. Thanks, you guys!

Still haven't heard back from the instructor, and I really wanted to just get something down since I have other things to work on. That was a weird assignment in general. I hope they're not all going to be like that.
 
Loss Leader said:
Well, I would definitely do this. I cannot imagine that a paper needs a citation when the entire assignment is the citation. However, I would cite the webpage:

Healthcare facility comparison from ZIP. (2019, March 16). Retrieved from http://https://www.medicare.gov/hom...letters-that-somehow-equal-your-search-result.
Click to expand...
Yes, this is a great addition!



isissxn said:
:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

I didn't even think of this. Thanks, you guys!

Still haven't heard back from the instructor, and I really wanted to just get something down since I have other things to work on. That was a weird assignment in general. I hope they're not all going to be like that.
Click to expand...
You're welcome! Hope your paper kicks academic ass!
 
isissxn said:
:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

I didn't even think of this. Thanks, you guys!

Still haven't heard back from the instructor, and I really wanted to just get something down since I have other things to work on. That was a weird assignment in general. I hope they're not all going to be like that.
Click to expand...
There's a reason I think higher education causes brain damage.
 
Childlike Empress said:
US Government Medicare Database approached [date] at medicare.gov
Click to expand...


A lot of links like this are only temporary search results (like here on the forum), but even if they aren't (like this one seems to be), the next time someone screws with the front-end to the database, the link will be worth nothing. So one should avoid being over-specific in general and specifically if the database has been named as the to-go source by the teacher.

But of course I don't even know what "APA" is, so take it as just a common sense comment.
 
Unfortunately, I only know the Harvard style of referencing. Where the Authors names, a year, and a page number, go into the text, and the full reference goes at the end of the paper.

Like this: "Recent research indicates a fall in Medicare (Jones, Smith & Teesdale, 2019, pp 45-67)

Where the author is a business or website I would provide the organisation name if there isn't a displayed author, like this:

(Medicare 2019)

In the references section at the end of the paper there would be a line like this:

Medicare 20 Mar 2019, http://fullURLname, Name of the online device that you used.
 
isissxn said:
And you chiseled your citations into stone tablets! Citing other stone tablets. We have it way too easy now.
Click to expand...

Actually the concept of writing down a citation didn't exist back then. The way it was done was you tied a string to your stone tablet on one end and the tablet you were citing on the other end.
 
Got the grade for my paper when I logged into school account this morning! 19/20. The point I missed was over a mistake unrelated to formatting or citations. You guys saved the day! :)

The instructor still never responded to my email. I guess she didn't receive it until after the assignments were already turned in? All indications are that she was not online at all last week (not active in our module, anyway), which isn't exactly cool. Maybe I should have gone to her office on campus and accosted her. Oh well. All's swell that ends swell.
 
Roboramma said:
Actually the concept of writing down a citation didn't exist back then. The way it was done was you tied a string to your stone tablet on one end and the tablet you were citing on the other end.
Click to expand...

References:

Ooog. (Year 3). Cave art demystified. Retrieved from Sandpit14

Grok. (Year 2). Fire - a revolutionary new technology. Village, Rock.
 
isissxn said:
Got the grade for my paper when I logged into school account this morning! 19/20. The point I missed was over a mistake unrelated to formatting or citations. You guys saved the day! :)

The instructor still never responded to my email. I guess she didn't receive it until after the assignments were already turned in? All indications are that she was not online at all last week (not active in our module, anyway), which isn't exactly cool. Maybe I should have gone to her office on campus and accosted her. Oh well. All's swell that ends swell.
Click to expand...

High five!
 
isissxn said:
Got the grade for my paper when I logged into school account this morning! 19/20. The point I missed was over a mistake unrelated to formatting or citations. You guys saved the day! :)

The instructor still never responded to my email. I guess she didn't receive it until after the assignments were already turned in? All indications are that she was not online at all last week (not active in our module, anyway), which isn't exactly cool. Maybe I should have gone to her office on campus and accosted her. Oh well. All's swell that ends swell.
Click to expand...


Congratulations on your grade.
 
isissxn said:
Got the grade for my paper when I logged into school account this morning! 19/20. The point I missed was over a mistake unrelated to formatting or citations. You guys saved the day! :)

The instructor still never responded to my email. I guess she didn't receive it until after the assignments were already turned in? All indications are that she was not online at all last week (not active in our module, anyway), which isn't exactly cool. Maybe I should have gone to her office on campus and accosted her. Oh well. All's swell that ends swell.
Click to expand...
Yes. Congrats. When I got post-bachelors's teacher certification 10 years ago I found it a tremendous challenge to get the simplest questions answered. In fact I was trying to earn a master's at the same time, but through a massive misunderstanding I ended up on a certification-only track. This was a kind of artsy-fartsy do-it-yourself curriculum and while my course descriptions earned praise, no one told me I had to use the state education department's approved titles for individual classes. Apparently I could study underwater basket-weaving as long as I called it Foundations of Education.

I did a lot of good writing for that course and I have thought of approaching the (private) college with a few grand and trying to get master's credit for some of that work. The issue of citations (APA I think) was a huge motivation killer. I was seeing education "researchers" citing their own past papers as support for their scholarly writing, but I had found out enough to know that a lot of education research is bunk - a few academics citing each other in a never-ending loop of earnest gobbledygook. I have read sentences like, "The brain plays an important role in learning" (with scholarly references, of course.) So I admire your grit and patience. Thankfully I didn't have to go through any of that to add certification to my ancient bachelor's degree.
 
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