Change APA reference list to single space

jillchesley

Hi all,
Sorry if this is elsewhere - couldn't find it. I want to change my APA reference list to single spaced. Zotero is double spacing it (as it should for APA), but my thesis advisor wants it single spaced. How can I do this? If edit in the word document,save and close, it just opens back as double spaced again. And please - speak to me like I'm 2. I'm not sophisticated with this tool.
Thanks,
Jill

adamsmith

You'll have to manually edit your citation style. This may look a bit intimidating, but isn't actually hard.
I'd recommend the visual editor
http://editor.citationstyles.org/searchByName/
- click on "Edit" for the APA style listed at the top.
- click on "Bibliography" on the left
- set "line-spacing" to 1 at the bottom right (you may need to scroll down on the right)
- click on "Info" on the left
- change the title to something different (e.g. "American Psychological Association - Thesis") what exactly doesn't matter, but make sure to change it.
- at the top left, hover over the small, blue "Style" in the menu and select "Save style"
- click OK when the editor asks you about changing the style's ID and link
- save the style and follow the instructions for installing it in Zotero displayed on the screen.

jillchesley

Hi Adam Smith,

Thanks for your reply. I followed your steps (thanks for being clear). It seemed to work ok in the stand alone Zotero, but when I dragged the .csl file into Firefox as instructed, I got this message: "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

Suggestions?

adamsmith

that's fine. it should have installed nevertheless.

jillchesley

Hi Adam,
I've followed your instructions - did it twice actually. Refreshed my document, closed and re-opened, closed Zotero and opened again. Still double spaced reference list. Is there a step I'm missing?!

adamsmith

try switching to an entirely different citation style and back?