Best practices for citing podcasts in APA 7th?

jeffnewman
edited March 7, 2021
Has anyone come up with a better way than this? (note: this post was revised twice to include information about handling dates, author roles, and the Container title field gleaned from @bwiernik's posts)

Problem

APA 7th Edition requires information that are not accounted for in Zotero's podcast fields. Specifically,

1. The specific date the podcast aired
2. The Name of the podcast series
3. The role of the participants

For more detailed information see Podcast References on the APAStyle website. Here is an example citation of a podcast episode:
Webster, M., & Abumrad, J. (Hosts). (2020, September 11). Bringing gamma back, again [Audio podcast episode]. In Radiolab. WNYC Studios. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/bringing-gamma-back

Workaround

1. As noted in other discussions on the forum you can use add Issued: followed by the date in year-month-date formate in the extra field of Zotero's template. For example:

Issued: 2021-03-22

2. To get Zotero to add the Series Title to the citation, add Container title: to the Extra field.

Container title: Liberation Pedagogy Podcast

If the podcast has a publisher you can add a Publisher: entry with the publisher's name to the extra field, as well

3. To get the authors to display with their roles, you need to put all host, guest, contributor fields in the author field, immediately after the author's first name.

Author: Desai, Chandni (Host)
Author: Naber, Nadine (Guest)

This should output as a properly formatted APA 7th podcast citation. If you add the author's full names, Zotero will format properly using the first initials.
Desai, C (Host) & Naber, N (Guest). (2021, March 3). Liberate your research (No. 14) [Audio podcast episode]. in Liberation Pedagogy Podcast. https://anchor.fm/liberationpedagogypodcast/episodes/Episode-14---Liberate-Your-Research-erddcr

Drawbacks

1. No date lookups your podcast will not be searchable or sort-able by date, since there is no date field (see previously mentioned discussions to understand the history behind this, it probably isn't fruitful to discuss here)

One last note... the required [Audio Podcast Episode] goes in Zotero's File Type field, without the Square brackets -- Zotero will add the square brackets when formatting the reference.
  • bwiernik
    edited March 5, 2021
    Dates in Extra need to be entered in this form:
    Issued: 2020-10-31

    See here for how to enter the podcasts from the APA manual in Zotero:
    https://www.zotero.org/groups/2205533/test_items_library/collections/MR2N872S/items/HYEYQKKT/item-details
    https://www.zotero.org/groups/2205533/test_items_library/collections/MR2N872S/items/HWIMSJBJ/item-details
  • jeffnewman
    Thanks, @bwiernik. I hadn't thought of putting the role information into the same field as the author's first name. I have updated my post to reflect your advice on dates and putting the author role information into the author's first name section of the author field. I think my post is still useful because it illustrates how to get Zotero to put in the required series and publisher information, where necessary.
  • bwiernik
    No, your post is still incorrect. The podcast series should be entered as a “Container title” in Extra, as illustrated in the linked items.
  • jeffnewman
    Ok, I think I see the problem. When I exported the This American Life example as Zotero RDF from the link above into my Zotero library it generated an APA citation that is missing the series and the publisher:
    Glass, I. (Host). (2019, October 26). Amusement park (No. 443) [Audio podcast episode]. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park
    In going back and taking a closer look I noticed that the Extra field contained the following information:

    Date: 2019-10-26 23:44:27
    Issue: 443
    Podcasters: _:n6
    Issued: 2011-08-12
    Publisher: WBEZ Chicago
    Container title: This American Life

    If I delete the line that says Podcasters: _:n6, the output becomes:
    Glass, I. (Host). (2011, August 12). Amusement park (No. 443) [Audio podcast episode]. In This American Life. WBEZ Chicago. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/443/amusement-park
    Is that Podcasters: _n:6 supposed to be there? If it makes a difference, I'm on a macbook pro running Zotero 5.0.97-beta.1+586a6f1dd
  • bwiernik
    That should not be there.
  • joleemo
    Thank you for providing this workaround.

    I'm trying to cite a podcast with 1 host and 1 guest, in my Zotero + Better Bibtex + Biblatex setup, but it's not working out because Biblatex abbreviates the (Role) to ( only.

    I've tried {\relax (Host)} in the author field, in attempts to prevent this abbreviation (as per ), but that did not work.

    I went to search for another workaround/solution and found the suggestion to add a line with author+an:role {1=host, 2=guest} (as recommended here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/579758) in the .bib file. This also does not display the roles correctly in the bibliography; while it correctly adds (Host) behind the first 'author', the second author gets no role (also when I changed 'guest' into 'host' for testing purposes).

    Any other ideas?
  • emilianoeheyns
    There is a way to insert relax commands in BBT, but I'd prefer it if we do support on the BBT issue list. You already have something there, but there we're diagnosing why the solution you already chose doesn't work for you, and none of the information above is there. It would be better to see if we can understand the problem before debugging a chosen solution, a better solution may be available.
  • emilianoeheyns
    https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues/2750
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