Bug? APA 7th ed. formatting of doctoral theses

terber

Concerning the reference of doctoral theses according to APA 7th ed., I read https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples/published-dissertation-references and Chapter 10.6 of APA's Publication Manual.

It seems to me that Zotero's APA 7th ed. stylesheet deviates from the APA rules about the formatting.

APA requires:

Author (2025). Some title in sentence case. [Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Zotero's "American Psychological Association 7th edition" style sheet emits:

Author (2025). Some title in sentence case. [Doctoral dissertation] Harvard University. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.

Note the different position of the closing square bracket and the missing comma.

Do I interpret this correctly as a bug in the citation style sheet "American Psychological Association 7th edition", or did I misunderstand something?

adamsmith

The style is checking for information in the Archive field to determine formatting. See
https://www.zotero.org/groups/2205533/test_items_library/collections/MR2N872S/items/LJ2RP7K8/collection and the other 'thesis' items in that collection for correct data entry that will format these correctly for the various thesis examples in the APA 7 manual.

dunning

To clarify further, APA has slightly different formats for published and unpublished theses: see the Publication Manual, examples 64–66. You're seeing the unpublished form because there isn't either a reference to a digital archive (i.e. the ProQuest number, which goes under the Loc. in Archive field) or a URL.

terber

Thank you to both of you for the explanation, @adamsmith and @dunning!