Modify APA 6 for South African legislation

msblane

How would I go about modifying the APA 6th edition style to cope with South African Legislation? The citation should be (Basic Conditions of Employment Act, 1997) and the bibliography should be:
Republic of South Africa. (1997). No. 75 of 1997. Pretoria: Government Printers.
OR
Republic of South Africa. (1997). No. 75 of 1997. Government Gazette. (No. 17678) - with Government Gazette in italics.
Or is there a way to get what I need by using an existing APA6 type and just putting the data in different fields?

bwiernik

I would recommend just entering this as a journal article like this:

Title: No. 75 of 1997
Author: Republic of South Africa (in single field mode)
Date: 1997
Publication: Government Gazette
Issue: No. 17678

msblane

Great - that's just what I needed. I was willing to change the code but not looking forward to it. Thanks!

msblane

On second thoughts ... it works fine except that the citation needs to list the title or short title, not the author.

adamsmith

That's not possible without significant editing of the style. The whole point of author-date styles like APA is that you can relatively easily match in-text references with the reference list, so there's no easy solution I'm afraid. Where do the requirements come from?

bwiernik

What is the exact format you need for the citation and bibliography (and as adamsmith asks, where do these requirements come from)?

msblane

The citation should be (Basic Conditions of Employment Act, 1997) and the bibliography should be:
Republic of South Africa. (1997). Basic Conditions of Employment Act No. 75 of 1997. Pretoria: Government Printers.
OR
Republic of South Africa. (1997). Basic Conditions of Employment Act No. 75 of 1997. Government Gazette. (No. 17678) - with Government Gazette in italics.

The requirement comes from the only document I can find that describes how to cite/reference South African legislation using APA6. If it can't be done, we will find a work around. I thought it might be relatively simple.

bwiernik

Supporting the diverse rules for citing legislation is never simple, unfortunately, particularly across different countries. The APA style defaults to (mostly) supporting US legal citations,

As a practical recommendation, I would recommend ignoring those rules and citing it like you initially did. This is by far the most common practice outside of actual legal publications (and certainly in I-O psychology). In that case, enter the data as a Report like this:
Title: Basic Conditions of Employment Act
Number: 75 of 1997
Author: Republic of South Africa (in single field mode)
Date: 1997
Publisher: Government Printers
Place: Pretoria

or as a journal article like this:
Title: Basic Conditions of Employment Act No. 75 of 1997
Author: Republic of South Africa (in single field mode)
Date: 1997
Publication: Government Gazette
Issue: No. 17678

If you want to strictly follow the requirement, you will need to edit the style. In the APA CSL style, legislation numbers are formatted in the legal-cites macro. Change the "Pub. L. No." prefix to just "No." and switch the order of the volume and container-title variables (and add a prefix to volume and italics to container-title). You will also need to change the issued macro to remove the conditional rules for legislation items. You could use the CSL Visual Editor to modify that macro to fit South African standards.

msblane

Thanks for the instructions on modifying the style. I will try it out.