eLocators and APA7th

Hello :)
I have noticed that the APA 7th style does not add the word 'Article' when article numbers or eLocators are used, as in PLoS ONE articles. This is a requirement of APA 7th now apparently. I am using the latest Zotero on a Mac running Monterey 12.2.1. I've tried it with both Google docs and Word for Mac 16.50.8 - same problem.
Thanks
  • It's a silly rule that I'd recommend ignoring, but the style will pick up number: e123 (where e123 is the elocator) in the extra field. You might have to remove it from the pages field, but I don't think so
  • I would also recommend ignoring this rule and just leaving the number in page. That is what actually appears in APA journals typically anyway.
  • Hello! Hey, thanks for the comments. Much of referencing IMO, has silly rules, however I am not in a position to "just ignore" them, for I will do so at my peril. My university has said we need to follow the rules, including that one, and if I do not, I risk failing my paper. One student did fail on her referencing last semester.
    So, my question is, if it is not going to be fixed in Zotero, can someone tell me how to do it myself in the style editor. I tried looking for it, but could not find it.
  • I told you how to do this in my post
  • No you didn't. Can you show me where you told me how to get Zotero to add the word 'Article' before e123 as locator?
  • Did you try what I suggested? The word article is put there by the csl style if the e locator is specified as number
  • I have tried adding the eLocator number to the 'extra' field down the bottom, as well as with the eLocator removed from the pages field. It does not add 'Article' to the reference.
  • Just double checked, you do need to remove everything from the pages field, but then this absolutely works and adds "Article" in front of the eLocator.
    How exactly are you testing? Are you getting the eLocator at all if it's just in Extra?
  • you do need to remove everything from the pages field
    @bwiernik remind me of the logic for this? I'd prefer people didn't have to remove stuff from the pages field for this to work, since that'll break most other citation styles. Why not prefer number to page for journal articles?
  • @carolssmith -- note that you actually have to write number: e123 into Extra, not just e123; sorry if that wasn't clear from the above
  • Ok. I'm testing by pulling the article in in the usual way, with pdf, and then manually moving the e123 number, refreshing Zotero, then trying in a Word document.

    No, it wasn't clear, thanks for clarifying. So I added 'number: e123' as you suggested to the extra field, and it works doing that. It's an awful lot of faffing around though, for something that surely should just work out of the box?
  • I just tried it again by simply adding "Article" before the e123 and left it in the pages field, that works too and is simpler, but again, I shouldn't really have to do this I'm thinking?
  • edited March 12, 2022
    well, APA is pretty much the only citation style that from one day to the next decided that what are, effectively, the electronic equivalent of page numbers (and are treated as such by most metadata schemas etc.) for some reason that has no logic in findability or intelligibility of references, require extra treatment -- so yeah, that's not working out of the box for a reason.

    As bwiernik (who's a psych professor himself) points out above, even APA's own journals ignore this, so the only people actually affected by this rule change are students unfortunate enough to have instructors who believe APA to be some sort of sacred text... which I do feel bad about, but there's really only so much we can do about that.
  • Yeah, well that all is probably true but of no help to me.
    Do you know if there are any specific directions/instructions anywhere, on how to make this tweak in the CSL myself? I tried Googling it and couldn't see anything. thanks
  • edited March 12, 2022
    What's the tweak you want to make though? CSL can't just look at your page field and tell that it's an e-locator (it generally can't test for details in the content of fields, FWIW), otherwise we'd already be doing this.
    It's not like we're ignoring the APA rule out of principle -- we've implemented it in CSL as you can tell. It's just a rule that's so impractical that it requires separate, custom data entry in Zotero.
    What you'd have to do to fix this would be to change Zotero's import, trying to import all e-locators as number: and that's a) technically quite tricky because it's not often easy to tell what you're looking at and b) would require you to modify javascript code in dozens of reasonably complicated scripts, which I'm guessing is going to take you significantly more time than years of manually adding Article in front of page numbers.
  • edited March 12, 2022
    @adamsmith I have a way of doing this to have my database import MODS parser take page numbers from the Zotero field and handle this as an Article number. I don't know how much effort would be required to incorporate what I do into Zotero styles or if my "thing" would be too messy and undesirable to implement.

    Many journal publishers already precede the article number with a letter (most often an "e") I manually add the e to the page number field. Perhaps, the APA style could recognize these e-preceded page numbers and properly format them. [In truth, I actually precede true single-page (letters and editorials) numbers with a special character and do an automatic search and replace of my MODS file export to drop the special character and add the "e" before true article numbers. This way I'm only needing to hand-edit the page number for a very few records.]

    For APA, does Zotero recognize the article numbers in journals (BMJ Group, Emerald Group, PLOS, that already include a preceding "e" and add "Article" instead?
  • @adamsmith What if I had the style print `number` even if there are `pages` considering that this data convention isn’t something we are likely to expand more generally ?
  • Yes, that's what I was thinking. Prefer number to page for journal articles (or am I misunderstanding you?) That way we could, a) add this to other styles easily if needed in the future and b) have translators put it in both if we want to fully support it
  • I do not seem to undertand how to get my refetnce to be 'Article' -
    I anciting the 'Law af the sea' whih has Aticlles not Paragraphs, and I need to cite
    (UNCLOS, 1982, Article 91) in APA. I can only do this by adding the full reference ", Article 91" in the 'suffix field' - This thread seems to indicate another method, but I can't get it to work. I am not familiar with editing styles and it seem daunting to me, so maybe I shoudl just leave it ?
  • No, this thread is about the bibliography, not citations. There'll be a option to select article in the add citation dialog in the near future, but that's a different topic
  • Thanks - and thank you for your patience and many useful answers.
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