Several bloggers have detailed nicely the ill-advised changes the APA made this year to its citation guidelines for journal articles. The posts by Catherine Pellegrino and Barbara Fister effectively detail why it is a bad idea to require people to have to track down a DOI for an article they want to cite and why it is an even worse idea to ask people to include the journal publisher’s URL even if the version of the article you used was one in a database (JSTOR, Academic Search Complete, etc.)
From what I’ve read online, there are some faculty members at other institutions who are asking their students to follow the more sensible guidelines in the previous edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (the 5th) instead of the rules in the latest one (the 6th). Should we have conversations with our faculty about the challenges of holding students to the confusing new rules in the 6th edition?