Italicizing web page title in APA 6 style

spicecoast

I'm using the Visual Editor for the APA 6 style, and I want to make what seems to be a simple modification. I want webpage titles to be italicized. However, nothing I try is working.

I essentially want the webpage title to be treated like a report title. So I added an OR condition for document type = webpage in parallel with the document type = report condition, and deleted the document type = webpage condition where it occurred earlier. That doesn't work.

I'd be grateful for a clue, a tip.

adamsmith

Nothing in APA style is simple -- that's why the style is as long as it is.
You most likely want to look at these two lines in the title macro
<else-if type="post post-weblog webpage" variable="container-title" match="any">
<text variable="title"/>
</else-if>
<else>
<text variable="title" font-style="italic"/>
</else>

and remove webpage from the first one, but note that the logic for titles in webpages is also contingent on the presence of a container-title (that's Website Title in Zotero). You'd also want to check what's happening in the substitute logic of the author macro, which will print titles absent authors/editors.

spicecoast

That gives me something to get my teeth into.

Thanks!

bwiernik

I would personally just suggest using APA 7. APA 6 specifically required to never italicize website titles, and that weird rule was removed in APA 7.

spicecoast

Thanks, bwiernik, for the APA 7 tip. It looks as though that could be a way out.

However, I'm curious about where APA 6 states that web page (I assume you mean web page and not website) titles must never be italicized. The online APA 6 guides I see recommend italic, e.g., https://aut.ac.nz.libguides.com/APA6th/websites.

bwiernik

It was an explicit rule given in the APA 6 manual (eg, see examples 74 to 77). In general, I wouldn’t trust any online guides not from APA itself—all of them I’ve seen are filled with errors. The APA CSL styles are very carefully written to follow the APA manual, you can trust that they follow the manual correctly.

spicecoast

Examples 74 to 77 deal with blog posts and messages posted to discussion groups and online forums.

I'll be happy to be corrected, but there seem to be no examples of a Web page in the manual. I suppose one could infer a "no italic" rule from Examples 74 to 77, but a style guide should say so explicitly. There seems to be neither such a prescription nor an example in the APA 6 manual.

bwiernik

Really at this point just use APA 7. It came out several years ago

spicecoast

Yes, I will. Thanks for the suggestion.