Problem with APA 6th Citing

divingbelle

Hi

When I used APA 6th for my last assignment any number of authors over 3 was changed to et al, however that seems to have changed and I still need it to be apa 6th but I also still need it to be et al for over 2 authors. Can anyone help, is there another similar style which will keep everything the same excpet the number of names? Thank you

adamsmith

Note that correct APA style is to use up to 5 authors on first citing an item, and then use et al for 3+ authors for subsequent citations. That's what Zotero implements.

I think https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=id:american-geophysical-union should work according to your description.

bwiernik

If you are seeing that an extra author is being added to (e.g., listing three authors instead of First et al.), what is likely happening is that you have two citations with the same two first authors and same year, so Zotero is following APA's disambiguation rules and adding extra authors to clarify which item is being cited.

igw

By the way @adamsmith, @bwiernik: Zotero's implementation of this sort of disambiguation (APA 6th ed.) is incorrect in the case of publications with three authors that would shorten to the same citation. In this case, all three authors would have to be listed instead of two authors + et al.

For example:
(Smith, Fisherman, & Carpinter, 1990; Smith, Tailor, & Stonemason, 1990)

When citing the second time, Zotero currently does:
(Smith, Fisherman, et al., 1990; Smith, Tailor, et al., 1990)

That's incorrect as per APA 6th. Correct would be (throughout):
(Smith, Fisherman, & Carpinter, 1990; Smith, Tailor, & Stonemason, 1990)

“Exception: If two references of more than three surnames with the same year shorten to the same form (e.g., both Ireys, Chernoff, DeVet, & Kim, 2001, and Ireys, Chernoff, Stein, DeVet, & Silver, 2001, shorten to Ireys et al., 2001), cite the surnames of the first authors and of as many of the subsequent authors as necessary to distinguish the two references, followed by a comma and et al.”

(APA, 6th ed., p. 175)

bwiernik

Ah, yeah, that is correct. @adamsmith This is a citeproc-js bug I think—“et al” should be used if there are actually multiple people being represented. I thought that citeproc-js had previously handled this correctly.

adamsmith

While the APA Manual is absolutely correct here (et alii is plural), unfortunately a lot of citation styles do this "wrong" (e.g. a lot of Vancouver styles will require first six authors + et al. for seven authors) so we can't implement this across the board in the citeproc.
Not sure if there's an easy solution -- it's thankfully quite rare.

fbennett

The processor follows the CSL Specification on this, and the add-names disambiguation code hasn't changed significantly in years. The behavior can't be changed in current CSL, but you can flag the issue by submitting test items that illustrate the problem. To submit items, join the public Jurism Test Submission group, sync, create a collection named for the style that shows the error, drop the items into it (with a note that they should be rendered together, in this case), and sync again.

bwiernik

@adamsmith What do you think, is this rare case worth making customizable by style? Or should CSL just pick one behavior?

adamsmith

I think I'd probably pick the non-APA behavior and run with it across the board, because that's likely to occur more often (in APA this occurs only when authors are added for disambiguation. Many other styles have something like et-al-min="7" et-al-use-first="6", so this happens all the time.)