Access date for APA

britannia

Hi there!

I know that many citation styles don't call for an access date to online sources in the bibliography anymore, but my professor wants me to use APA and include the access date as well.
Can I somehow get Zotero to do it for me or do I have to fill in all the dates myself in the bibliography?

Thanks and take care!

adamsmith

(I'll just mention for future reference that that's incorrect APA style -- most sources should be cited without accessed date, which APA correctly says is basically useless).

If you do need an access date in APA style, you'll have to edit the style.

Find

<choose>
<if variable="DOI">
<text variable="DOI" prefix="http://doi.org/"/>
</if>
<else>
<choose>
<if type="webpage">
<group delimiter=" ">
<text term="retrieved" text-case="capitalize-first" suffix=" "/>
<group>
<date variable="accessed" form="text" suffix=", "/>
</group>
<text term="from"/>
<text variable="URL"/>
</group>
</if>
<else>
<group>
<text term="retrieved" text-case="capitalize-first" suffix=" "/>
<text term="from" suffix=" "/>
<text variable="URL"/>
</group>
</else>
</choose>
</else>
</choose>

and change to
<choose>
<if variable="DOI">
<text variable="DOI" prefix="http://doi.org/"/>
</if>
<else>
<group delimiter=" ">
<text term="retrieved" text-case="capitalize-first" suffix=" "/>
<group>
<date variable="accessed" form="text" suffix=", "/>
</group>
<text term="from"/>
<text variable="URL"/>
</group>
</else>
</choose>

General instructions (pay particular attention to the need to change style title and ID) here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step

britannia

Excellent, thank you!

strikedamic

Hi, how would this be applied for APA 6th edition? It seems to be set up differently with more if-elseif controllers.

bwiernik

It’s the same basic setup, with these same two options. The key thing is to add the “retrieved from” term line before the ‘date variable=“accessed”’ line