Article #s in APA

afry

I teach several classes in which I have students use zbib.org rather than the full version, although I expect the problem I have exists in both versions.

When article numbers exist, APA style says they should be preceded by "Article." In the APA manual, an example is item #6 at the top of page 318.

Zbib omits "Article" from the citation. Here's the Zbib output for the example used in the manual:

Burin, D., Kilteni, K., Rabuffetti, M., Slater, M., & Pia, L. (2019). Body ownership increases the interference between observed and executed movements. PLOS ONE, 14(1), e0209899. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209899

It should be "Article e0209899."

I can teach the students to edit the citation to make this right, but is there some way to get Zotero to give the correct output?

dunning

Until Zotero adds this as a field, article numbers can be added in the Extra field:

number: e0209899

Here is an example:

https://www.zotero.org/groups/2205533/test_items_library/collections/5V67EPX3/items/GYRVLCVL/item-details

This will also work in recently revised styles such as Chicago and MHRA.

adamsmith

Not automatically -- metadata provided by most journals doesn't distinguish between page numbers and 'article numbers' (e.g., in the site header of the PLOS article you use as an example you find <meta name="citation_firstpage" content="e0209899"/>. That's why this particular APA invention is a rather silly (and entirely unnecessary) complication. I'd honestly just tell students to ignore it.

But since people really like their APA details, Zotero's APA style is actually aware of the distinction and you can get the right citation by putting "Number: e0209899" into the extra field, but while possible in zbib, that doesn't really strike me as in the spirit of the tool.

dunning

I suspect the reason for this APA rule is that some journals have numeric article numbers, meaning that you could get a plain number that looks like a page reference without the ‘Article’ label.

adamsmith

sure, but... what's the problem? It's not like people will start browsing through non-existing issues in search of a 'page number'. They just click on the DOI. If they told people to leave out the article number because it (almost always) just duplicates DOI info, that'd be one thing, but requiring extra labeling for something that's this irrelevant is just not a useful rule. I'd expect this to go away again in the 8th edition.

afry

Thank you both. Although I'd prefer an automatic solution, you've both been helpful. I don't really have the authority to tell them to ignore it. I'm happy with your responses, but here's some more info if you are interested.

I think it's crazy, but I think dunning is right about why they use it. I use an example in class with the article #6. On the native platform, it tells you that it is an article number, but databases just say 6, so I think a normal person with some knowledge of APA looking at the database record would interpret that as issue 6 and wonder where the page numbers are.

I think the problem is that the DOI isn't always the best way to access the article. You could hit a paywall. We have software that gets you past the paywall, but I think most people will search for the journal, not the article, and then navigate to the article. So in my example above, they aren't browsing for page numbers, they are browsing for the non-existent issues and think something is wrong with the platform.

Thanks again!