APA 6th new style

A relatively polished APA 6th edition style is now available in the repository
http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa/dev?install=1
This should asap replace the general APA style - I'd be very thankful if some people could help testing this important style and provide reports here.

Edit: This link may actually not work yet - it will work as soon as the filename is updated in the repository
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  • If this is intended to replace the default APA style, it can be committed as that file instead of a new one. If people will still be required to cite based on the older manual, the old style can be moved to apa5 (or whatever).
  • I know - thanks - but I wanted this tested before I replace a widely used style.
  • You wouldn't be replacing it. Committed styles become dev styles.
  • ah yes makes sense, I've changed this accordingly.
    Also updated the link in the first post.
  • Hi Adam,

    As requested I am playing around with the new APA 6th. There seems to be a problem in the reference list with ordering the publication chronologically. The output is in reverse chronological order. I think it should be the other way around. So not as in the extract here:

    Dahl, R. A. (1961). Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city. Yale studies in political science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
    Dahl, R. A. (1958). A critique of the ruling elite model. The American Political Science Review, 52(2), 463–469.
    Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioural Science, 2(3), 201-215.

    Does it matter if the text was set up in APA 5th and then transferred to 6th?
  • no it doesn't matter - that's the beauty of it!
    Thanks for testing. I don't think I can change the order of sorting - (just the variable on which they are sorted, which seems to be correct) but I'll find out.
  • Any further feedback on this? Unless I'm told otherwise, this style will be included in 2.0b7.3 as the default APA style (though not pushed to 1.0 clients).
  • I haven't heard anything to the contrary.
    I'd also suggest that the mla2009.csl replaces the current, outdated MLA.
    I think it's pretty much ready for prime time and in any case a lot better than the current MLA.
  • If you add in http://www.mq.edu.au/learningandteachingcentre/iherd/docs/Writing_Guide.PDF to a library then when you export it to clipboard via the APA 6th style (both the old one and this one) then the problem is the underlining for the link only goes to the end of Writing_Guide and does not include the .PDF.

    This is probably an export issue more than a style issue but I am not sure.
  • it doesn't have anything to do with the style. Not sure about the details, might even be the way word deals with hyperlinks.
  • I'm using the new APA 6th style on 2.7b4 and have run into a little problem with the disambiguation handling.
    I have to different sources which appear in the same way when cited inline (from the second usage on):
    (Enkel et al., 2005; Enkel et al., 2005)

    On first usage, the citation is (correct) as follows:
    (Enkel, Kausch, & Gassmann, 2005; Enkel, Perez-Freije, & Gassmann, 2005)

    Unfortunately, I do not have access to the APA style guide but this can't be right... Does anyone have an idea what to do?
  • I seem to remember that Zotero cannot currently deal with this issue, but I'll have a look later.
  • indeed, as I suspected, Zotero isn't able to do this if it only occurs in subsequent citations.
    I believe the people working on csl 1.0 have thought about this, so this might be possible in the near future.

    To make matters worse, I have not been able to find any indication of how this _should_ be solved in the free online ressource available for APA style.
  • edited November 1, 2009
    I looked into the matter a little more. As it seams, the "disambiguate-add-names" property should take care of this problem, which is set to true in the APA 6th style definition - yet does not seam to have an effect on this.
    Here's the description of the property for the Zotero CSL reference:
    "disambiguate-add-names - add additional names, disregarding the “et-al” setting, to disambiguate the citations."

    I've also checked how this should be handled and I believe the proper approach is:
    (Enkel, Perez-Freije, et al., 2005; Enkel, Kausch, et al., 2005)
    This would correspond to what the "disambiguate-add-names" property is meant to do.
  • As a side note: this is problem is not the result of using multiple sources in one citation. It also occurs if the sources are cited separately.
  • yes, I know the function. The problem is simply that currently Zotero's disambiguation capabilities aren't sophisticated enough for this. The add-names option only works for the first citation, not for subsequent ones. This should be relatively easy to fix in csl 1.0 - maybe someone involved can let us know if it is in fact included.
  • I was able to fix the sort order to ascending, though. I remember now that had come up in the past, but it never was an issue for me because Zotero sorted correctly for me by default. I've added this as an explicit codeline now so it should work for everyone.
    update your style using this link:
    http://www.zotero.org/styles/apa/dev?install=1
  • Thanks for the info adamsmith. I'm looking forward to an update, as this isn't the first disambiguation issue I've run into :(
  • Hi Adam,

    I noticed today that in the case of a second revised and or extended edition, this is not reflected in the APA bibliography, although I put it in the 'edition' field when inputting the reference.

    For instance, my reference list shows:

    Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

    According to me this should read as :

    Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A radical view (2nd Rev. ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Second, although I downloaded and installed the fix above the reference list still does not give the publications in chronological order:

    Haugaard, M. (1997). The constitution of power: A theoretical analysis of power, knowledge and structure. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

    Haugaard, M. (2009). Power and hegemony. In S. R. Clegg & M. Haugaard (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of power (pp. 239-255). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

    Haugaard, M. (2002). Power: A reader. Manchester: University Press.

    Haugaard, M. (2003). Reflections on seven ways of creating power. European Journal of Social Theory, 6(1), 87-113. doi: 10.1177/1368431003006001562

    Many thanks for your help
  • The second appears to be a sorting bug - I don't know what causes it and I haven't been able to replicate it, but other people have reported the same thing, so it's definitely there.
    I don't remember, maybe there is a workaround somewhere on the forum if you search.

    The revised edition is due to a limit in csl, too: Zotero does one of two things: If the field has a number in it, it takes the first number and treats it like an ordinal number, ignoring the rest. If the field doesn't have a number, it just prints the field. I don't have a way of changing that afaik. (well, I could tell it to always just print the field - and if that's what you want I can tell you how to customize that in your own version of the APA style, but that's not going to be in the public version).
  • Thank you for getting to work on this 6th so quickly, it only just came out. I have just been using the style briefly, but I have noticed that it seems that the citation for documents downloaded from the internet (e.g. grey literature) includes the date when they were retrieved. This is no longer necessary according to APA 6th (page 192), unless the document is likely to change (not the case for books, or papers, for example).
  • thanks - how do you suggest to distinguish that? I could include the date only for webpages, would that make sense?
  • edited November 4, 2009
    I guess I would be conservative in removing, but if I understand APA 6th correctly I would certainly remove the retrieval date from books and papers for starters, and might leave it for blog entries and forum messages (although these do not actually change once posted). The only reference APA 6th actually mentions is Wikis, in which the retrieval date is of course important. So I would say yes, web pages only is a good option.
  • Would you mind testing this?
    Go here
    http://gist.github.com/226820
    Use the "Raw" Link on the top right to download.
    Install by dragging to an open FF window. It would be great if you could report back here.
  • Is there anything specific you want us to look out for?
  • the only thing I changed is taking out the retrieval date for everything but webpages.
    So look at a couple of items with URL, see if they look right.
    Thanks, much appreciated.
  • I just updated a document with a decent number of books and book sections with URLs and it seams to work fine. Haven't cited any websites so I can't tell you much about that but the CSL corresponding code looks good.
  • I've just run into a small problem with the sort - I'm not sure if this is related to the issue mentioned above.
    I have the following situation: Two sources from one author with two different dates. In the bibliography they are sorted in the order they occur in the text - not chronologically. So citing (Alam, 2006) ... (Alam, 2002) renders:
    Alam, I. (2006).
    Alam, I. (2002).

    In case it helps, I've exported the sources as RIS: http://pastebin.com/f341f0d54

    Is this a general bug or a problem with the style?
  • this is a general bug - nothing wrong with the style.
    Maybe worth experimenting when exactly the bug kicks in.
    E.g. does it happen the same way if we sort for variable="issued" instead of macro="issued-year" ? Any other indications of what could be going wrong?
    Does anyone know? Dan? Frank?

    I think I've found the place in the csl.js that does this, but I don't read js well enough to be able to understand:

    if(Zotero.CSL._dateVariables[variable]) { // date
    var date = a.getDate(variable);
    if(date) keyA.append(date.getDateVariable("sort"));
    date = b.getDate(variable);
    if(date) keyB.append(date.getDateVariable("sort"));
    } else if(Zotero.CSL._namesVariables[key.@variable]) { // names
    var element = <names><name/></names>;
    element.setNamespace(Zotero.CSL.Global.ns);

    this._processNames(a, element, keyA, context, null, [variable]);
    this._processNames(b, element, keyB, context, null, [variable]);
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