The below text illustrates a possible 5-section structure for something like a blog post or a review paper, including how to integrate in-text citations following APA formatting. See the Purdue OWL website for a guide to all things APA formatting.

An Informative And Engaging Title That Doesn’t Oversell And Is Probably Shorter Than This One

Start with a paragraph that describes the phenotype (or whatever topic) to the reader. What is it? What is it NOT? Why does it matter/why did you pick it? How could information from behavior genetic methods help us understand this topic?

A Theme/Subheading

eg. Heritability of X

A paragraph that summarizes research pertaining to this theme/topic. It may come from one source, or from many. Please use APA parenthetical citations in text (Derringer, 2018).

If you are descibing the results of a study, be sure to include the details that are necessary for the reader to understand its finding and implications (like the sample size and the method used). For examples of common academic-sounding phrases to use to describe research see the Academic Phrasebank.

A Second Theme/Subheading

eg. Genes Associated with X

A paragraph that summarizes research pertaining to this theme (Derringer, 2018). If there are multiple sources within the same paragraph, provide a citation after every continiguous block of information. So if there are two consecutive sentences from one source, you do not need a citation at the end of each sentence (Derringer, 2019). Please use APA parenthetical citations in text (Derringer, 2018).

A Third Theme/Subheading

What is a third interesting thing you want to tell the reader?

Derringer (2020) noted that every paragraph that contains anything other than your own opinion should have at least one citation. If an entire paragraph comes from a single source, then that citation goes at either the beginning or the end of the paragraph.

Each paragraph is its own block of information. So if there are two paragraphs that all come from the same source, you still need one citation per paragraph (Derringer, 2020).

Discussion

Include for example: summary of conclusions, call-to-action/suggestions for future research

Wrap it up with a very brief overview of what is known and what is not known. What do you, as the author(s) of the topic summary, recommend as the next step for advancing our understanding of this topic? Do we need bigger samples? Better measurement? To focus more on understudied factors?

References

APA formatted listing of all sources cited in the text. See Purdue OWL for APA formatting guide. You can get APA formatted citations from Google Scholar by clicking on the quotation mark icon below an article’s search listing.

Derringer, J. (2018). Parenthetical citations and you. The Journal of Things I Said, 3(6), 22-27.

Derringer, J. (2019). Multiple sources make the world go ‘round. Current Directions in Things I Said, 9(2), 45-46.

Derringer, J. (2020). Make sure there’s at least one citation per paragraph. Nature Things I Said, 1(1), 1-2.

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