How to APA 6th in LaTeX?

Question

I have previously been writing psychology manuscripts according to the standards of the American Psychological Association (APA, version 5) using the excellent apa class, with apacite managing my references.

However, there have been many changes to this standard with the release of the new version of APA's formatting requirements (now in version 6) a year ago. Neither of the packages apa nor apacite have been updated in light of these changes to the APA requirements, and I have not been able to determine if such work is in progress and whether it is possible to contribute to such work (although I have no programming skills myself).

So, does anyone use LaTeX to write papers in APA 6th, and if so, have you got any recommendations or packages that make this work easier?

Answer 1

There's now the apa6 package on CTAN. It essentially brings apa up the the 6th edition. You still need a separate package for citations and references.

http://www.ctan.org/pkg/apa6

From the page:

The class provides a full set of facilities in three different output modes (journal-like appearance, double-spaced manuscript, LaTeX-like document), in contrast to the earlier apa6e, which only formats double-spaced manuscripts in APA style. The class formats documents in APA style (6th Edition). It is built on the apa class (which is no longer maintained), and has been updated to comply with 6th-Edition requirements. The class can mask author identity for copies for use in masked peer review.

Answer 2

To format your references, now you might use the package biblatex-apa. It is made for the 6th edition of the APA Style Guide. It does require biblatex, though, so it might be a little work to adjust your .bib.

But you'll be better off moving away from bibtex anyway.

Answer 3

I don't write to APA style, but I do copy-edit APA a lot (mostly 5th, still).

The style class and bibliography style files for the major scholarly styles don't ensure that you write in accordance with the style. Rather, they give you tools that allow you to write documents that are in accordance with the styles. Typically, they don't provide you with the ability to fully exploit the style: there has been something of a gulf between, say, how Chicago MoS recommends that translations of works be summarised in a reference list, and the opportunities to actually represent this information in a Bibtex file.

APA has done better, due to the relative simplicity of the style and Erik Meijer's excellent work. I can't think of much in the way of changes from 5th to 6th that needs support in the apa class, but you will need to make changes to how you handle bibliographies. The three most important changes are:

1. Your "howpublished" fields for text retrived from reasonably stable URLs don't need dates, so what would have been howpublished = {Retrieved on Ides of March, 44BC, from {\tt http://et-tu-brutus.tld}} in your .bib file now would be howpublished = {Retrieved from {\tt http://et-tu-brutus.tld}}. But you don't have to do this.
2. 6th is fussier about qualifying cities with countries or states. So there will be changes such as from address = {Elsevier: Amsterdam} to address = {Elsevier: Amsterdam, Netherlands}. I this is slightly reader unfriendly, so I recommend not doing this if you can avoid it;
3. 6th wants ellipsis rather than "et al." in reflists with too many authors (from author = {$FIRSTSIXAUTHORS et al.} to . I think there is a case for using a \lastauthors#1 macro to handle this change. I don't like this, but it is probably me being resistant to change, and it's perhaps to obvious to conceal.

These three can all be changed by editing your .bib files. The joy of Bibtex' limitations mean that you will need to keep two sets of .bib files, with all the consistency errors that entails, if you will need to keep writing to both the 5th and 6th. I recommend always running Bibtex once, when you have a reaonably complete set of citations, and cutting and pasting the resulting .bbl file in place of the \bibliography command. This means that you correct and work with the actual form the reflist takes in your document, and you can tweak it without worrying about the limitations of Bibtex. This, IMO, results in appreciably better reflists, and ones that are easier to collaboratively edit with colleagues. You can still run Bibtex on the .aux files produced by Latex, to get new \bibitems to cut and paste into your [thebibliography} environment.

Is there another, particular change with the 6th that you are concerned about?

Answer 4

Great question. In case it's useful the following are some good general links. However, I post them more for the benefit of others who may stumble on this page. They don't directly address your question of specific issues related to APA 6th edition.

• William Revelle's notes on LaTeX and APA style
• Ista Zahn's document Learning To Sweave in APA style.
• My own notes on APA referencing with LaTeX

Answer 5

Here are the links I found to packages for LaTeX that aims to implement the formating of APA 6th edition:

• apa6 claims to be a complete implementation of APA 6th edition.

• apa6th is a slight modification of apa.cls that for example implements the headings defined by APA 6th

• apa6e seems to be a new implementation of the APA 6th style. I'm not sure how compatible it is to apa.cls.

Answer 6

I finally hacked together a series of changes to the apa.cls file to allow for submission under strict APA manuscript guidelines. I also added another document mode that is more 6th-compliant while still more visually pleasing than the man mode. Together with biblatex and biblatex-apa (now supported in MikTeX 2.9b), this provides a complete solution.

It would be great if someone had the patience to properly merge all these hacks into an update to the official apa.cls. Ideally, one could specify man, man6, doc, doc6, or jou modes. In my hacking, I just overwrote the existing man mode, but did add a doc6 mode.

Answer 7

Using Biblatex & Babel for APA reference style:

\usepackage[british]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{british}{british-apa}
\addbibresource{references.bib}