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:
- 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.
- 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;
- 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?