American Psychological Association (5th edition)

Chris_hk

The journal I am submitting asks for the APA 5th edition but Zotero seems to have the 6th edition only.
Are there any differences between the two, I suppose there are, and what are they?
Or, can the 5th edition be made available again? There are many journals ask for this or earlier editions.
Thanks.

adamsmith

As a first step I'd make sure with the journal that they haven't just failed to update the author info page - my experience with those is that they tend to be in terrible shape.
Using outdated APA is really a slap in the face of authors, partly because all the good online citation guides are for the most recent editions.

Zotero had a pre-6th edition APA style, that can probably be dug up from the archives, but if I remember correctly, I also fixed a whole bunch of general issues with APA in the process of implementing 6th edition changes, so I'm not sure how much fun you're going to have with that.

Chris_hk

Thanks. The journal is Comparative Political Studies which is a pretty good one. I doubt that they simply fail to update but I will check with them.
http://www.uk.sagepub.com/journalsProdManSub.nav?prodId=Journal200828&crossRegion=asia
Do you happen to know about core differences between the two?

Cheers.

adamsmith

look here
http://ocls.cmich.edu/APA%206th%20Edition%20CHANGES.pdf
or here
http://flash1r.apa.org/apastyle/whatsnew/index.htm
it's actually pretty minimal - there are only two major changes for references-
the inclusion of the doi in all cases in 6th ed. and the different listing of multiple authors.
The former is pretty easy to change - I can see if I get to that sometime this week - the latter is not implemented anyway, because Zotero can't do the first authors ... last author thing that APA now requires for more than 6 authors - anyway, that one probably won't affect you in polisci anyway.
Please do check with the editors, though, about changing to 6th edition.

Chris_hk

Cheers. So I will simply not provide the doi into my zotero database and, right, no citations with more than three authors here. Thanks!

adamsmith

Zotero automatically gets the doi for a lot of journals - and as an increasing amount of styles want it, you should keep it/add it - it's really no big deal to change the style, I'd do that.

Chris_hk

Sorry, I have no idea how to change a style in Zotero. Can I do that myself?

anders_royce

Read the first link, and use the second as a reference.
csl_simple_edits [Zotero Documentation]
dev:csl_syntax_summary [Zotero Documentation]
You will just need to remove the part that adds the DOI to each item in the bibliography section of the style.

Chris_hk

Thanks for the prompt replies. I'll give it a try.

zurpher

At my Faculty I am also required to use APA 5.

adamsmith

I guess I'll add a 5th edition to the repository.
I still think it's stupid of journals/organizations to do that - maybe talk to your people about that...

adamsmith

I have just added an APA 5th addition to the repository - I haven't tested it thoroughly - please report back with any problems.

zurpher

Thanks!