Using ampersand symbols (&) instead of the word “and” for bibliography style apa

Question

My supervisor just came with an idea to use the ampersand in citations and bibliography, so e.g.

Smith and Watson (1992)

should become

Smith & Watson (1992)

How can I make it work with bibtex and bibliography style apa?

Answer 1

Make a copy of apa.bst. (In a current TeX Live distribution it is located in /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/beebe/apa.bst ). Call it myapa.bst or something appropriate, and save it in your local texmf folder: <path to local texmf>/bibtex/bst.

Edit the function {format.names}

Change line 250

 { " and " * t * }

to

 { " \& " * t * }

Edit the function {format.lab.names}

Change line 876

{ " and " * s #2 "{vv~}{ll}" format.name$ * }

to

{ " \& " * s #2 "{vv~}{ll}" format.name$ * }

Now use \bibliographystyle{myapa} in your document.

The current version of the APA style uses "&" in the bibliography, but not in the citations, I think. So if you really need to conform, you should change only the format.names function, not the format.lab.names.

Alternatively, switch to using biblatex-apa, and redefine the \finalnamedelim macro:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
\addbibresource{<your-bib-file>}
\newcommand*{\finalnamedelim}{%
   \ifnumgreater{\value{liststop}}{2}{\finalandcomma}{}%
   \addspace\&\space}
\begin{document}

...

\printbibliography

\end{document}

The redefinition of \finalnamedelim is not required if you don't change in-text citation "and"; the bibliography entries will automatically use "&".