Why are some entries in my Bibliography not in APA format?

zestygirl
I have just received an assignment back where my Bibliography was completely created from Zotero entries. To my horror, my lecturer has marked a swathe of entries as not being in APA format!
I have setup Zotero with APA (6th) as default and have used Word with the Zotero plugin (preference set to APA 6th) to insert citations and the bibliography.
Where did I go wrong?
  • adamsmith
    We'd have to see the entries to say more (just paste a couple here). Most likely the data were not entered correctly in Zotero. There are also some components of APA 6th that Zotero can't fully handle.
  • zestygirl
    Hampden-Turner, C., & Trompenaars, F. (1997). Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business (2 edition). New York: McGraw-Hill.
    Hofstede, G., & Hofstede, G. J. (2004). Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind. McGraw Hill Professional.
    Lingenfelter, J. E., & Lingenfelter, S. G. (2003). Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching. Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic.
  • adamsmith
    Yes, that's a data entry problem, see https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/sentence_casing
  • zestygirl
    Perhaps it is the way I am importing entries into Zotero that is wrong? I usually just click the safari plugin. Should I do it a different way?
  • adamsmith
    No, you just can't rely on every site to provide Zotero with perfect bibliographic data. E.g. many sites store title in headline capitalization like you have it. While you can figure out which sites get you better import (e.g. most library catalogs do this right) there's no substitute for checking the data after importing them if you need very precise citations.
  • zestygirl
    Ok, thanks. That is very helpful. I have assumed too much and have some work to do in my Zotero database.
  • dstillman
    Be sure to note the tip on the linked page about converting existing titles to sentence case (though you'll need to correct proper nouns yourself, which is the whole reason it can't be automated).
  • zestygirl
    Yep, thanks, I will work through my library and convert all the titles to sentence case as explained in the link.
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