APA 7 -Modify sort order of same first author, same year citations in text and in bibliography

edited April 15, 2022
Hi,

I would like to modify APA 7 so that:

"If multiple papers occur with the same first author and year, these are ordered by when they are first cited in the text (receiving an a, b, c, etc. after the year both in the text and in the bibliography) - but not only Popopa 2017a, Popova 2017 b, but also Popova et al. 2017a, Popova et al. 2017b."


A similar request was already solved in 2018 with a solution that worked for me when I was using a different citation style, but now will not work with APA 7. Could anyone help me how to modify it in APA 7?

The solution that worked previously was by adamsmith and was to insert the following in the citation and bibliography sections:

<sort>
<key macro="author" names-min="1" names-use-first="1"/>
<key macro="issued-year"/
<key variable="citation-number"/>
</sort>


(https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73121/modify-sort-order-of-same-first-author-same-year-citations-in-text-and-in-bibliography)

The corresponding sections I think I need to modify in APA 7 are as below, but if I try the above, it does not work, because so many other things are different in APA 7 compared to the style I was using previously. As you can see, my programming knowledge is extremely rudimentary, so cannot figure it out on my own. Any help much appreciated!

Citation:

<sort>
<key macro="author-bib" names-min="3" names-use-first="1"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group"/>
<key macro="date-sort-date" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="status"/>
</sort>

Bibliography:

<sort>
<key macro="author-bib"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group"/>
<key macro="date-sort-date" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="status"/>
<key macro="title"/>
</sort>


  • Is this for a specific journal or publisher? Can you link to the guidelines?
  • Hi, it is not for a specific journal or publisher, it is an adaptation my university requests for the APA 7 style.

    So the specific problem is that if I quote Popova et al. in my essay, the first citation in the text changes to "Popova et al. 2017b" after I add a second article with the same set of authors published in the same year, even though I want the first citation to be "Popova et al. 2017a" and the second one to be 2017b.

    So the text curently reads "The global prevalence is... (Popova et al. 2017b), in the UK it is X% (Popova et al. 2017a)". I would need it to be: "The global prevalence is... (Popova et al. 2017a), in the UK it is X% (Popova et al. 2017b)", when these are the first mentions of these articles in the essay respectively.

    The bibliographic items, as currently displayed, are:
    Popova, S., Lange, S., Probst, C., Gmel, G., & Rehm, J. (2017a). Supplementary Appendix: Estimation of national, regional, and global prevalence of alcohol use during pregnancy and fetal alcohol syndrome: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Global Health, 5(3), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(17)30021-9

    Popova, S., Lange, S., Probst, C., Gmel, G., & Rehm, J. (2017b). Estimation of national, regional, and global prevalence of alcohol use during pregnancy and fetal alcohol syndrome: A systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Global Health, 5(3), e290–e299. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(17)30021-9

    and here again, I would need the first item ("Supplementary") to be 2017b, and the "Estimation..." to be 2017a.
  • I think I might have found a solution. Possibly the "Supplementary Appendix" was labelled "a" due to the page numbers (1-55) preceding those of "Estimation" (e290-e299), the dates in Zotero were identical (2017-03). When I slightly changed the dates, dating "Estimation" March 1st, 2017 and "Supplementary" March 2nd, 2017, the sort order changed to what I wanted, so a change of the code might not be necessary after all. Thank you, bwiernik, that you were looking into this for me!
  • The assignment of “a” and “b” is determined by the ordering of the items in the bibliography, not their order of appearance. This is a deviation of your university requirements from the APA manual, so I would suggest first directing your supervisor to the APA manual to show that “b” appearing first is correct.

    If you do need to change this, as <key variable="citation-number"/> as the second sort key in the bibliography.
  • I will try to talk to him again, and otherwise try out citation-number. Thank you very much for your help, bwiernik!
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