APA Format for Bibliography

2
  • milliken
    Also, The APA has a new version of the APA Style Guide to Electronic References (2007) that updates most of the formats for electronic sources. The biggest one is for journal articles and involves DOIs.

    Articles with DOIs use that instead of a retrieval date/url/databasename combination. This can be important because, at least for the EBSCOhost scraper, the doi isn't grabbed. The example from the Guide is:

    Stultz, J. (2006). Integrating exposure therapy and analytic therapy in trauma treatment. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 76(4), 482-488. doi:10.1037/0002-9432.76.4.482

    Many other categories of sources have changed too. Has anyone checked Zotero's current output against the new Guide?
  • bdarcus
    Articles with DOIs use that instead of a retrieval date/url/databasename combination.
    To be more precise, the rule is then:

    if DOI, use DOI
    else if URL, use URL

    This goes back to the fact that it is incorrect to store the URI for the journal database site as a URL; it should be stored as a link.

    Bruce
  • mc
    edited November 11, 2007
    The edition of a book is not showing up in an APA bibliography, i.e. where there is an edition other than the first the bibliography should read:
    Author, A. (Year). Title of book (2nd ed.). Place: Publisher
    Author, A. (Year). Title of book (3rd ed.). Place: Publisher
    Author, A. (Year). Title of book (4th ed.). Place: Publisher
    etc.

    BTW: Word 2003, Word plugin 1.0b1, Zotero 1.0.0rc6.r1847
  • nh
    Is there any way that the issue number could be removed from the APA formatting of journal articles in bibliographies? It appears to have been requested in this thread in 12/2006, but hasn't been done by version 1.0.1.

    In APA format, issue numbers are excluded unless the journal resets page numbers with each issue. I assume zotero has no way of knowing whether that is true for any given journal, but since 98% of journals use continuous pagination, it makes more sense to have the "default" behavior be to leave out the issue number.
  • milliken
    I notice that a ticket has been added to add DOIs to the APA bibliography style for articles. Thanks!

    I hope the rest of the changes, for blogs, e-books, wikis, email lists, and several other categories of sources will also be updated too.

    I'd be happy to send a pdf of the new version of the APA Style Guide to Electronic References to anyone who would be working on it, if they don't have their own copy.

    Btw, all of this hard work is appreciated!
  • mc
    Can I second millikel's comment and add editions of books to the list of APA fixes (see my previous post) above?
  • rytmisk
    I wonder if it would be possible to add conference presentations which have no proceedings to the apa bibliography output like exemplified on http://www.wisc.edu/writetest/Handbook/DocAPAReferences_Conf.html

    Would rock!

    Best
    Ketil
  • kmc
    Simon: From your September 6 post:

    "I saw and corrected the issue with formatting of page numbers. I will commit these changes soon, and they should appear in 1.0 (if not earlier)."

    I have version 1.0.1 installed and I'm still getting page numbers going at the end of the citation instead of after the book title.

    Also, I was happy to discover the suppress authors function, but noticed that it still leaves a comma and a space before the year.

    Example: Olivares et al. (, 2002) studied…

    Not a huge deal to correct as I'm writing, but it would be nice if this could be corrected in future versions.

    Thanks for all your hard work on this!
  • adamw4
    Is there any way that the issue number could be removed from the APA formatting of journal articles in bibliographies? [...] In APA format, issue numbers are excluded unless the journal resets page numbers with each issue. I assume zotero has no way of knowing whether that is true for any given journal, but since 98% of journals use continuous pagination, it makes more sense to have the "default" behavior be to leave out the issue number.
    I noticed this was changed recently because it affected some of my references to articles in online-only journals, which look rather odd now without the issue number. I had a look at the APA CSL file using the csledit.xul method I've seen referenced here, and managed to add some code which checks to see if the reference has page numbers; if it doesn't (presumably meaning it is an online-only journal) it includes the issue number. This worked for me within the csledit.xul interface, but probably would need further proper testing to be sure it doesn't mess anything else up. I also don't really have any CSL knowledge, and only figured this much out by looking at the rest of the APA CSL file for similar code to copy. Perhaps ideally there would be a little check-box or something for each item to tell Zotero whether to include the issue number or not. In any case here is the additional CSL code: 
    <choose>
    <if variable="page">
    </if>
    <else>
    <text variable="issue" prefix="(" suffix=")"/>
    </else>
    </choose>
  • bdarcus
    I'd like to return to the issue of, um, issue numbers that adamw4 brings up again. In short, I think this was the wrong decision and plan to change it back unless people here can convince me otherwise.

    My reading is this:

    APA allows, but does not require, omitting issue numbers in continuously paginated periodicals. But since a) not all periodicals are continuously paginated, b) we have no way of knowing or encoding that they are, and c) redundant-ish information is not a bug (I really cannot see anyone being bothered by an additional "(3)"), I think the proper behavior is to include the issue number.

    Responses?
  • paulanus
    Another issue: Since summer 2007 APA has modified its handling of doi/URL for articles available online (though maybe in print in as well). However, it appears that the reference type needs to be set to "electronic journal" rather than "journal" so that doi/URL are included -- at least this make it work in EndNote.
    However, there is no such a ref type in Zotero, and using "journal" and APA style in Zotero will not output doi/URL.

    Any suggestion for a work around in Zotero? Maybe adding "electronic journal" as new ref type?
  • Jackliu008
    I am using Zotero now, and I agree that its interface is fantastic. however, there are still a couple of errors in its APA format.

    1.the volume number is not italicised.
    2.the issue number is still there. (Mentioned above)
    3. without capitalizing the important words of journal names (Mentioned above).

    Also, once a while, not very frequently, but not rarely either, automatic capture omits the year of the publication (like this article in Pubmed: Research in paediatric neuropsychology past, present and future).

    Especially when I use Zotero to generate bibliography automatically, these small problems are really annoying and reduce the productivity a lot. so if they can be solved, I would be very grateful.

    Thanks.
  • timlevin
    Is there any way to get the "report number" to show up in exported HTML? I don't see it in any style I have exported (see entry below) but APA requires it: "If the issuing organization assigned a number (e.g., report number, contract number, or monograph number) to the report, give that number in parentheses immediately after the title" ( http://www.library.cornell.edu/newhelp/res_strategy/citing/apa.html).
    Thanks,
    Tim

    Etu, T., & Ehuy, C. (2008). An analysis of comfort. Princess Anne, MD: Big School.

    @techreport{sec99a,
    Author = {Timothy Etu and Cynthia Ehuy},
    Title = {An Analysis of Comfort},
    Publisher = {Big School},
    Address = {Princess Anne, MD},
    Number = {NS-CS-06-001},
    Month = {August},
    Year = {2008}}
  • wlamia
    edited March 4, 2008
    I'm just trying out Zotero, and I put in a couple of simple sources, books I found on Amazon. When I put the citation in a document and generate the APA bibliography, it seems to be putting the number of pages in the book in the bib. list. This isn't at all standard. Why is it doing this, and how do I get it to generate correct citations?


    update: I had the wrong citation type attached to the record - when changed to 'book' it seems to work correctly. However, Zotero is not generating standard APA dissertation citations, even when the source is captured from Digital Dissertaions.
  • jamaral
    Help! When I generate a bibliography in APA format, I'm getting a comma after the article title rather than a period. Thanks!
  • Tjowens
    We just fixed this in the dev version of the style. It should update in the next few days on your local copy of Zotero.
  • mikowitz
    edited March 20, 2008
    The updated version of the APA style has been pushed to the repository. Your copy of Zotero should auto-update within 24 hours, or you can update manually by clicking Update Now in the General pane of the Zotero prefs.
  • simmers
    I am having problems with the capitalization of titles in references -- extensions.zotero.capitalizeTitles is FALSE, but all except first letter in a title is lowercase. Is it possible the updated version has a problem - or perhaps it is my newbie ignorance...
  • erazlogo
    See this thread
  • cmc
    Hi - I am experiencing a problem with APA formatting using Zotero. I had imported all my old references from Endnote into Zotero, but the space is missing between the author's first and middle initials after the import procedure (i.e., Author, A. B. becomes Author, A.B.). Unfortunately, Zotero seems to not realize that those are two separate initials: When I insert a bibliography, the author shows up as Author, A. (i.e., missing middle initial) and not Author, A. B. Moreover, if I have one citation for Author, A.B. and one for Author, A. B. in the text of the paper, Zotero thinks they are two separate people and therefore inserts the initials of the author in the text citation. Any possible fixes for this? I'd prefer not to have to manually add the space in the authors' names for 700 imported citations! Thanks much!
  • jimlyttle
    APA requires us to leave out issue numbers unless the pages reset. Endnote handles this by listing every journal they can think of, which is not practical for our purposes (and not very practical for them, either). Thus, the system should probably default to NO issue number, as long as that issue number is stored successfully and can be retrieved if needed. This is one of many ridiculous charactersitics of APA (like using initials to hide the gender of authors), but those of us who work with APA are stuck with it.
  • erazlogo
    edited August 19, 2008
    I'm happy to change the style, except the previous consensus was to leave issue numbers in. Can we perhaps have more votes on this issue?
  • bdarcus
    Yeah, my argument for leaving it in is that it's more evil to leave out necessary information than to include that which is unnecessary. No sane copy editor is going to complain about the latter case, and if they do, then the user should remove the offending content/data.

    I suppose a reasonable counter-argument is if, say, 95% of journals are continuously paginated, in which case adding back the missing information would be a relatively more rare occurrence (though still a PITA).

    Suggestion: someone contact APA and tell them to change this silly rule.
  • msuguy71
    I have noticed another issue with Zotero and the APA reference list it outputs. The APA manual 5th edition on page 299 states that the reference list should be double spaced. Zotero outputs it as single space (at least in Word 2007). Do I have something set wrong? If not, can this be changed?
  • numa
    Hi I am not okay with Zotero's formatting of journal articles using APA. Zotero generates bibliographies with DOIs. This is not part of the standard as set out in the 5th edition of the APA publication manual:

    Author's last name, First and Second Initial. (Year). Article title. Journal title, volume number(issue number), page numbers.

    I will appreciate if someone can tell me how to delete fields I don't need from bibliographies generated, which is the DOI in this case. Thanks.
  • noksagt
    @numa:
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/798/#Item_25
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/4884/
  • numa
    @noksagt:
    Thanks, your guide to the post helped. The DOI issue has been sorted and it's no longer generated.
  • trixpan
    Hi there,

    I'm using Zotero 2.0b6.2 and for some reason the APA style implementation doesn't seem to be compliant with the APA guide.

    When using either the Word plugin or "chrome://zotero/content/tools/csledit.xul" I get the following results:

    Single Citations
    (R. Schneider et al., 2006)

    Multi Citations
    (R. Schneider et al., 2006)

    As mentioned by the original post of this entry, the APA style requires up to 5 authors to be listed on the first reference. Maybe a new bug?

    Cheers
  • RintzeRintze
    edited July 11, 2009
    I don't think so (assuming your item has six or more authors). For the APA CSL style, "et al" kicks in for citations with six or more authors, and then only shows the first one. This seems to be what APA specifies:

    "Six or More Authors: Use the first author's name followed by et al. in the signal phrase or in parentheses."
    http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/03/
  • FCL
    I agree with trixpan. APA style requires up to 5 authors to be listed on the first reference and only thereafter " author et al, year".

    When I tried APA it gave me (Turshen 1999) as in-text citation instead of (Turshen, 1999). How do I format it to display it correctly (without having o use the editor for every entry)?

    Also what about on-line documents like university working papers, governement or NGO reports and so? Can we add "Retrieved July 10, 2009 from url" somewhere in the final reference list?

    How can I disable Zotero, when using Import to EndNote in Google scholar?

    Cheers

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