Upgrade StorageCompliance with APA format
I am preparing my first 3 chapters for proposal defense. I converted my references over to Zotero about 6 months ago and have been building my biblio in that. (And I like the operations of this program better than Endnote) Now that my editor has begun work on them, we are finding conflicts with her software and strict APA standards that comply with university requirements.
Zotero has done such things as:
1.not sourcing all authors in the first-time mention but just giving one with et al
2.changing the capital letter following a colon (:)to lower case in the titles consistently
3.putting periods at the end of URLs that I don't put there
4.changing one space after periods to 2
Another concern I have is that I must merge reference lists from 3 chapters now into one independent section of my dissertation. Do you know how I might have Zoterao do that, once I get the references corrected from above errors?
Thank you all for you advice/help.
Linda
Zotero has done such things as:
1.not sourcing all authors in the first-time mention but just giving one with et al
2.changing the capital letter following a colon (:)to lower case in the titles consistently
3.putting periods at the end of URLs that I don't put there
4.changing one space after periods to 2
Another concern I have is that I must merge reference lists from 3 chapters now into one independent section of my dissertation. Do you know how I might have Zoterao do that, once I get the references corrected from above errors?
Thank you all for you advice/help.
Linda
Other things Zotero does which doesn't comply with APA format:
- Random insertion of author initials into citations.
- Citations with multiple sources aren't always in alphabetical order (no matter which order they are selected).
- Journal volume numbers are not italicised.
Despite the bugs, it's still a great research tool.
Regards,
Dave.
You're correct though, book volume numbers are not meant to be italicised, only journal volumes. Even so, use more journals than books so it's less editing than before.
Two online guides for APA style:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/08/
http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/tutorials/citing/apa.html (links to journal & book references at the very bottom of the page)
How is this ... ... a more sensible solution than itemizing the problems in Zotero so they can be fixed? I'm pretty sure Endnote has its own problems.
I was curious as to your success in correcting the above mentioned errors? I am
not a user at this point. I am just doing some research for my significant other
who is in the initial stages of writing a thesis which needs to be APA compliant.
I have noticed quite a few comments in the past regarding Zotero's ability to follow the guidelines. I would like to know what the situation is at this time, i.e. if most issues have been addressed or not.
The other 2 systems I have been looking at are Bibus and BibTex. I noticed there is
an APA style module that was developed by Ben Salzberg at Reed, which is supposed to follow the APA guidelines as close as possible. Here is the link to
download that style module:
http://web.reed.edu/cis/Help/LaTex/images/apa-good.bst.zip
I do not know if Zotero is able to use BibTex styles, or if there is a way to convert,
but thought I would pass on the info, just in case.
So are Zotero users overall happy with the results they are getting for
creating APA compliant documets, or is Zotero best for research--- then
going to another tool for correct, or at least more accurate, formatting?
I haven't used Bibus and BibTex so I can't directly compare the two, sorry.