APA Formatting Issue

chrisaberson
I've used Zotero 1000s of times for APA style references. I have never seen this issue before -- instead the page numbers going after the volume(issue), the citations for my paper all say things like Article 3 instead of providing the page numbers. The meta data clearly have page numbers listed. Example of the issue below How can this be addressed? I've literally got 100s of citations and really don't want to have to go in and do the page numbers manual (MS Word on a PC)

Ale, C. M., McCarthy, D. M., Rothschild, L. M., & Whiteside, S. P. H. (2015). Components of cognitive behavioral therapy related to outcome in childhood anxiety disorders. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 18(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-015-0184-8
  • poettli
    Do you have "Number: 3" in the Extra Field?
  • chrisaberson
    Yes. Why would Zotero import that to EVERY reference? I've used Zotero like a billion times for papers and never has something like this that spans across all the references happened.
  • poettli
    Why would Zotero import that to EVERY reference?
    Not sure what you mean. I have imported the item to Zotero through the connector on that page: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10567-015-0184-8
    No "Number: 3" has been added to the Extra field.
  • chrisaberson
    Good on you.

    But I still am getting the same issue. I had to rebuild the entire library because Zotero web does not export to word properly.

    I have no issues with the 1000s of files I've done natively in Word. Export to word from GDocs killed my library (there is no reasonable way to sync). Re-inserted everything. Now, this nonsense. I can clearly see in the metadata that the pages fields are correct, just not being inserted where needed.

    This seems like a glitch that Zotero support might care to jump on.
  • poettli
    edited 26 days ago
    Remove "Number: 3" from the Extra field if you don't need it. The page number will appear. The csl file for APA is written to take advantage of extra information stored in the Extra field, when required. See for example: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/437300/#Comment_437300
    Not all the styles are written the same.
  • dstillman
    edited 26 days ago
    @chrisaberson:

    https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines#etiquette

    You seem confused. Anyone responding to you here is trying to help you, but no one can do that unless you actually provide more information. As @poettli said, this doesn't happen just saving the item from its publication page into Zotero normally. So if you'd like help, you'll need to provide the exact steps you took to import these items.
    I had to rebuild the entire library because Zotero web does not export to word properly.
    I have no idea what you mean by this. The Zotero web library has nothing to do with Word. You use the Word plugin with the desktop app, which syncs seamlessly with the web library.
    Export to word from GDocs killed my library (there is no reasonable way to sync)
    If you're talking about the Zotero Google Docs plugin, you have to transfer the document properly. If you just download the file, Zotero citations will be broken.
  • chrisaberson
    edited 26 days ago
    Yes @dstillman I understand all of that.

    Also, please don't squak about the Web library not being friendly with other desktops. There are 100s of threads on that.

    And again -- I've looked at the metadata -- page numbers are populated. There is an extra entry that is also populated. There is no reason for the "extra" to be imported to the document when the format clearly states that page numbers go in that place.

    Perhaps you are the one that is confused?
  • chrisaberson
    @poettli -- that works but, I shouldn't have to manually fix this on over 200 records.

    This is APA style -- it is pretty much the most common format. Seems like Zotero might want eyes on this piece.
  • dstillman
    I'm not sure why you've decided to take this tone with the people trying to help you, but it's totally bizarre and inappropriate.
    Also, please don't squak about the Web library not being friendly with other desktops. There are 100s of threads on that.
    I genuinely have no idea what you even think you're saying here.

    We've explained above 1) why this is happening, 2) that this doesn't happen when importing the item from its official publication page, and 3) what you would need to tell us if you want us to look into why it happened to you. There is absolutely no bug in the APA style — you are just totally confused about that.

    If you want to adjust your tone and actually provide what we've asked for, someone might be willing to help you further. Otherwise, you're just going to be banned from further posting here.
  • chrisaberson
    @danstillman

    My tone reflects yours. This is a really stupid issue in Zotero.

    I Imported every reference new to Zotero for Word. Fresh.

    The only solution I've heard is to go and remove all of the material from the extra field ... for 100s of references. Come on @zotero -- let's fix this ... and also, please figure our Sentence case vs. Title Case for references. This is getting old.
  • aborel
    edited 26 days ago
    The case is perhaps not clear for all other participants, and there seem to be several underlying problems.

    Apparently, numerous references were imported with some incorrect metadata. How were they imported into Zotero? The origin of that problem could help to (1) prevent the problem to happen again and (2) find the easiest way to fix the existing records.

    I am also unsure what re-insertion we are talking about here. Is this the bibliography inserted into documents (in Word or Google Docs) and the Zotero library itself?
  • chrisaberson
    The Google Docs conversion failed.

    I manulally re-inserted all of the citations -- all linked to citations that would not format. I then added every citation manually using the Zotero add citation thing.

    To be very specific -alll the journal references with issue numbers were imported with the extra field populating in place of the pages
  • chrisaberson
    @aborbel

    Every reference was re-inserted manually. I re-did all of the citation inserts. I was working with a RIS file that was exported from a web client.

    Stuff looked good in Google Docs -- and it all got messed up in Word.
  • poettli
    Let's focus on the first issue: the Extra field.

    I have tried via the connector from:
    - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10567-015-0184-8
    - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10567-015-0184-8.pdf
    - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26001645/
    - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Components-of-Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy-Related-Ale-McCarthy/0df1f75b6d90640f1b73356ff4f77e6c276ef227
    - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=Components+of+Cognitive+Behavioral+Therapy+Related+to+Outcome+in+Childhood+Anxiety+Disorders&btnG=
    - https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:000359641700003

    As well as different export format (bib, ris, enw...) from:
    - https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:000359641700003
    and
    - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&q=Components+of+Cognitive+Behavioral+Therapy+Related+to+Outcome+in+Childhood+Anxiety+Disorders&btnG=

    And as far as I can see, any of them is writing "Number: 3" in the Extra field. (While writing all sort of information in some case, which is not from Zotero side but from the website side.) So we way have missed something and need your help to sort this out.
  • adamsmith
    And just to explain why this is happening-- the reason "Number: 3" creates "Article 3" in APA style is to correctly format electronic article numbers according to the APA Manual. Most other styles just treat them as page numbers, which is why they're also written to "Pages", but APA has decided they require different formatting, which Zotero/CSL's APA style does.
  • aborel
    I have found some references in my own library where the issue number is indeed recorded as an Extra (besides the normal Issue field). I can't see any general trend in them, so the cause remains elusive.

    On the corrective side, it is possible to perform an advanced search for Extra containing "Number:" in order to identify the problematic records. One still needs to fix them somehow, but at least one doesn't need to browse through the whole library.
  • poettli
    edited 26 days ago
    Update: Save to Zotero --> Save to Zotero (Embedded Metadata) on https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10567-015-0184-8 does write "Number: 3" in the Extra field. (However, it is not in the first position and doesn't seem to be picked up by the style.)
  • aborel
    edited 19 days ago
    Reviewing the offending records in my library, I have observed that the affected references are mostly from journals of 3 publishers: Nature, MDPI and Chimia.

    I can reproduce the incorrect import using the PKP Catalog Systems translator on Chimia papers, for example https://www.chimia.ch/chimia/article/view/2024_558
    as well as for MDPI papers such as https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/17/5/1266 using the MPDI Journals translator. I don't have any plugin installed on this machine.

    Nature journals look OK, perhaps someone has been working on them in the mean time.
  • aborel
    edited 19 days ago
    PKP, MDPI and Nature translators all call the Embedded Metadata translator under the hood. But the Nature translator indeed contains a fix, introduced 6 months ago https://github.com/zotero/translators/commit/7bed28c0ed418f781f1079161cd8f07579a33458

    :-)

    So I guess the solution would essentally the same for various publisher platforms, or directly in the Embedded Metadata translator (unless there are unfortunate side effects).
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