Configuring Zotero for APA 7 Citations with Institutional Author Initials

heraclito2077

Hello,

In APA 7 guidelines, when the author is an institution, such as the World Health Organization, you should include the full name of the organization in the reference, followed by the initials in brackets, for example, World Health Organization [WHO]. In the first citation, use the complete format, for instance, (World Health Organization [WHO], 2023), and in subsequent citations, when there are a large number of references, you can use just the initials, like (WHO, 2023). How can I set up Zotero to automatically generate these citations with the organization's initials after the first bibliographic citation?

Thank you in advance.

adamsmith

You can't really. We generally recommend ignoring this rule and just using WHO as the author and World Health Organization as the publisher -- as I understand it, this is widely done and accepted (and published) in APA journals.

It is possible to work around this with some effort and a custom version of the style, but I'd avoid that if at all possible.

heraclito2077

Please, could you give me some general guidance on what needs to be changed in the style so I can try to make the change?

adamsmith

The way I have done this is to put the full name of the org as a a single field author and then define the short version using citation-label: WHO in Extra.
You can then do something like
<if variable="citation-label" match="any">
<text variable="citation-label"/>
</if>
<else>
<names variable="author">
<name form="short" and="symbol" delimiter-precedes-last="always"/>
</names>
for the short author on subsequent citations.