APA Interview Format

In APA format, interviews should be listed as a "personal communication" for in-text citations (just like the e-mail item type), and should NOT be included in the bibliography. Any chance of having that adjusted?
  • edited June 22, 2019
    There are at least two things that might be called an "interview". One, the interview to which you seem to refer, is a conversation that you, yourself, have with someone. Another is a published (or unpublished) interview conducted by someone else with a subject. The item type you use (if any) to enter the interview into Zotero will result in the presence or absence of the citation in the reference list.

    edit spelling error
  • Right now, ‘interview’ assumes a published/retrievable interview. Personal communications (letter, email, instant message) have logic to distinguish between retrievable communications and non-retrievable communications. I can adjust the style to apply the same logic to the interview type; that sounds reasonable to me.

    For now, use letter, email, or instant message instead for personal communications.

    Note that it’s not possible in official CSL to omit a cited item from the bibliography. That will need to be deleted manually at the end of writing.
  • Gotcha. Makes sense. I thought it might be doable to put a "suppress bibliography" checkbox like the one for "suppress author". Thanks!
  • edited June 23, 2019
    Just some thoughts:

    1. In a custom style, wouldn't it be technically possible to omit all information for a certain item type in the bibliography entry? That is, don't display author; don't display title; don't display year, etc., etc., so that the entry ends up blank? I'd use one of the less useful types like "instant message". But without testing that, I don't know if it might cause some weird problems for sorting or leave blanks lines, etc. At least they'd be easy to remove. Or you could simply flag them all with some obvious prefix or suffix to know to remove them.

    2. Why do you want to treat informal personal communication as an item, anyway? I just write that in manually (if attached to a published article, as a suffix e.g. ", personal communication"). I only include actual references in my Zotero library (e.g., something someone else could look up in theory, even if informal like a manuscript/draft, but not a conversation I had). Up to you though.
  • djross3 I agree with you, but APA requires you put an in-text citation like, (Smith, J., "personal communication", 2019). I like to put that in the Zotero library simply because it’s faster to include in my document instead of having to type it in every time. Less typing=Happy!
  • @scottyhuff I definitely agree regarding having Zotero automate this process. For now, I suggest you change these items to use the Instant Message type, which will give you this format.
  • Yes and if you want, it would be relatively easy to make a custom version of APA that also, for example, sorts all of the "Instant Message" type items to the beginning/end of the bibliography for easy deletion. (Search the forums for "sort by item type" and then just only sort in a special way for the "Instate Message" type.)
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