In-text Citation Author Limits

gpanza · December 15, 2018

Hi all,
I've tried to find this in the forums, but I don't think I'm using the correct search terms. Anyways, I'm working on a paper that has a word limit and requires APA 6th edition. The requirements show in-text citations as only the first author's last name and year. e.g. (Jones, 2010). However, my in-text citations use all the authors names. e.g. (Schilero, Grimm, Bauman, Lenner, & Lesser, 2005). This has caused my paper to exceed the word count.

How can I get all my in-text to simply be 1 author and the year?

Thanks.

damnation · December 15, 2018

In line 699 of the style you change it to this et-al-min="1" et-al-use-first="1".
You'll also need to change the name of the file, ID and self link (lines 6-7) to something like apa-modified so it doesn't get overwritten with the next update.

General editing documentation is here: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles

adamsmith · December 15, 2018

Note, though, that APA 6th edition indeed requires up to 5 authors on first citation, so Zotero is doing this correctly as per APA.

bwiernik · December 15, 2018

As adamsmith states, the Zotero APA style carefully follows the APA rules here. If you want to break the APA rules and jump immediately to et al. even at the first citation, try this style:

https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-tools/blob/master/apa-short-authors.csl