I will be taking care of it. The changes look like they will be pretty minimal, so I expect to have it done within a few weeks of the new manual being published.

Any update as to when this will be done? I'm still only getting 6th edition as an APA option.

I've been going through the Publication Manual and I was wondering how Zotero will handle the rule regarding article numbers (pp. 295, 318)? Whereas in the sixth edition article numbers seem to have been treated the same as page numbers (e.g., PLOS ONE, 10(10), e0141186), in the seventh edition the rule is that articles with article numbers should include the word "Article" (capitalised) followed by the article number (e.g., PLOS ONE, 10(10), Article e0141186.) This seems like a bit of a nuisance to me and I don't really see the rationale behind it. Will Zotero have a way of handling this rule?

That sounds good, Adam, but I wonder how it would work in practice (an article number field isn't standard, so maybe there would be issues with importing entries from elsewhere?) And it would presumably mean that users would have to edit entries in their library that currently have an article number in the page number field? I'm not sure why the Publication Manual has opted for this as a rule—it seems to increase workload but with no appreciable benefit.

This has implications for import translators. Especially now that Elsevier journals now publish articles with article numbers instead of page ranges; this is another group of journals (BMC, Futures, MDPI, etc) where I must distinguish between single-page articles/editorials and longer items and manually add an "e" prefix to the numeric string.

Will there be some attempt to automatically add the "e" upon import?

@bwiernik "This would require the ability to test for page ranges versus singletons."

Alas, it is a bit more complicated than that. Several publishers that I deal with follow the law and engineering conventions and only provide metadata listing the first page number of a page range.

"I guess that one solution to this would be to convince publishers to preface their article numbers with an 'e'."

Wiley already does this, but I'm not sure how widely it's been adopted: https://authorservices.wiley.com/asset/photos/eLocators_text_for_author_site.pdf

I have maintained an online APA guide for our library for over 20 years, have taught APA for nearly 40 years, and have taught Zotero to my students for many years.

Regarding the document/article number, it is placed in the page number position. APA is not saying all must begin with "e". Instead, that is one example they placed in the Manual. When I downloaded the Manual example from PLoS ONE into Zotero, the metadata put e0209899 in the Pages field. For BMC articles (and others) would download that document/article number metadata & place it in the page number position too, but it is up to the journal how that article number is formatted. The new APA rule is now permitting what Zotero has done for years.

I agree we are seeing more publisher web sites & full-text databases which only provide the first page of an article.

However I agree with all of you that requiring the prefix of Article is just insane for research managers like Zotero.

Is there metadata code which identifies document/article number instead of page number? If so, couldn't we build in an IF statement that when it sees document/article number, for APA style it Then prefixes in the reference generator the word Article?

There is an ACRL (librarians) webinar scheduled for next week to discuss these changes. I am hoping one of us will raise this issue, along with a few others (like dates of retrieval).

@mstrahan There is a `number` CSL field that could be used for this purpose. The problem though is that basically no databases provide this sort of number separately from the page numbers

@bwiernik I agree the new edition changes are very complex, and will take more than a few weeks. Some are easy, like changing the # of authors rule for applying et al., but others such as the Article number (previous posts), are more difficult below the surface. Last Thursday I participated in a webinar led by three APA style developers. I also e-mailed one of them privately asking whether they considered how changes would affect research managers such as Zotero. It crossed their minds, but the emphasis was on making it both easier & clearer for researchers in general.

Honestly, as I mentioned earlier, I don't really think we need to worry about (for the most part) the page number. In my experience, Zotero will get it right. In @bwiernik example, Zotero correctly downloaded the correct page range & put it in the Pages field. This is the same situation for supplements or special issues, where each page number begins with "S".

If a publisher does not provide that metadata at all, or incorrectly provides it, the researcher still has the responsibility to make sure the downloaded metadata appears correctly in the entry.

My point though is that if that were the character, at least Wiley sometimes prefaces page numbers with “e”, so it wouldn’t be a great differentiator.

A draft of APA 7 is available from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bwiernik/styles/apa-7/apa.csl

It still needs testing. Please let me know if you run into any issues or bugs.

The modified dates update automatically when the style is accepted to the CSL/Zotero repository.

(The locale info you’re point to isn’t relevant. Those are just changing the translation of “et al” for different languages.)

APA 7 says to use “et al” in text in all cases when there are 3 or more authors. The only exception is when more authors are needed to disambiguate two references that would otherwise be the same:
(Smith, Wilson, et al., 2010)
(Smith, Jones, et al., 2010)

The style implements these rules correctly.