Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and the Yahoo Answers website is now in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Can I use short forms of variables in a table in APA style?
I'm writing a psychology lab report and in my table is has columns repeatedly labelled "mean", "standard deviation" etc. and I need to reduce my word count and was wondering if I could put M for mean and SD for standard deviation, etc. after I've written it already?
1 Answer
- ?Lv 68 years agoFavorite Answer
Yes, if it is a common type of statistical term, that is absolutely fine.
The best thing to do is to ask a librarian or a graduate student for a copy of the APA style manual. See table 4.5 and chapter 5 for helpful information in this regard -- you could also Google "APA style tables" or the like to browse examples.
This may be a good first link for a list of common abbreviations:
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/the-gram...
For tables, you would usually use the singular form as headers, so M and SD (not Ms and SDs) -- both italicized -- are acceptable.
Hope this helps. Good luck!
Source(s): I use APA style in my research writing and teach it to psychology undergraduates
