Sort order in APA CV style seems wrong

edited January 31, 2022
I would like to use the APA CV style for a report which sorts the entries by descending dates. However, I experience that at the end of the outputted bibliography, all the conference papers (paper-conference) appear and the list is therefore not sorted overall by dates. Is this some special APA rule or is this an error?

The reason for the behavior is the following macro in the CSL file:

<macro name="date-sort-date">
<choose>
<if type="article-magazine article-newspaper broadcast interview pamphlet personal_communication post post-weblog speech treaty webpage" match="any">
<date variable="issued" form="numeric"/>
</if>
<else-if type="paper-conference">
<!-- Capture 'speech' stored as 'paper-conference' -->
<choose>
<if variable="collection-editor editor editorial-director issue page volume" match="none">
<date variable="issued" form="numeric"/>
</if>
</choose>
</else-if>
<else>
<date variable="issued" form="numeric"/>
</else>
</choose>
</macro>


For every case the same line <date variable="issued" form="numeric"/> is performed. However, all conference papers with an editor (or any other of the mentioned variables) are excluded and therefore no value is given for these cases. Can we fix this and what would the correct case distinction be here?
  • @bwiernik -- seems to me like we want this macro to be a single line: <date variable="issued" form="numeric"/> I don't see why conference papers should be handled different, but more generally, I don't think any item type distinction makes sense here (one could argue that CVs distinguish between peer reviewed publications, books and other, but I think that gets too messy and with too many borderline cases to put in a general style)
  • Yeah, I think this is just sloppy changes from the base style, which has more complicated sorting based on whether the full date is printed
  • Thank you for the confirmation that there is no special APA rule for this behaviour.

    I just experimented and there seems also to be an unwanted sorting for the normal APA style if we have several entries with the same authors, e.g. currently the following order for the normal APA 7 style is outputted:

    Connor, J. (1980). Article title. Journal Titel.
    Connor, J. (1990a). Conference paper title with no editors. Proceeding Title.
    Connor, J. (2020). Article title. Journal Titel.
    Connor, J. (1990b). Conference paper title with editors. In J. Doe (Ed.), Proceeding title.


    I can work on a pull request to replace the complicated code in the macro with the simple line mentioned by @adamsmith.
  • edited January 31, 2022
    I’ll take care of it
  • But the above can't be right? Why are published conference papers sorted differently?
  • @adamsmith The macro date-sort-date which was used also in APA 7 normal style was outputting the following for the examples above:
    1980
    1990
    2020


    i.e. the last entry was maped to nothing which sorts last overall. With the fix in the PR the normal sorting will be established again (also in such cases like here).
  • Yes, thanks, saw the PRs, I was replying to an earlier version of bwiernik's comment
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