APA style citation with apacite package

Question

I am trying to put APA referencing using apacite but failing miserably. Here is my minimal trial example.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[BCAY]{apacite}
\title{Brief Article}
\author{The Author}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
stuff \cite{anderson2012}

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{reference}

\end{document}  

Inside my 'reference.bib' is following :

@techreport{anderson2012,
    title = {Alcohol in the European Union : WHO Regional Office Europe},
    author = {P. Anderson and L. M{\o}ller, G. Galea},
    url  = {http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/160680/e96457.pdf},
    year = {2012}
}

And it is gives following warnings :

LaTeX Warning: Citation `anderson2012' undefined on input line 17.

No file text.bbl.
[1] (./text.aux)

LaTeX Warning: There were undefined references.

 )
Output written on text.pdf (1 page).
SyncTeX written on text.synctex.gz.
Transcript written on text.log

and following document

I am using Texshop and by changing typeset to bibtex i get following message

This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (TeX Live 2015)
The top-level auxiliary file: text.aux
The style file: apacite.bst
Database file #1: reference.bib
apacite.bst [2013/07/21 v6.03 APA bibliography style]

Then back to Latex,

Answer 1

The problem is that your url field contains underscores, which is a mathmode character. So solve this you need to tell apacite to deal with URLs properly. To do this, add load the url package:

But there is a second problem: the [BCAY] option should not be used unless you are working with an old document. It was included for backwards compatibility purposes, and should not be used any more.

I also made some corrections to your bib entry. Author names should be separated by and not commas. Things that need to preserve their capitalization need to be enclosed in {}. See:

• BibTeX loses capitals when creating .bbl file

% !BIB TS-program = bibtex

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
% This next bit is just a way to make a self-contained document containing
% a bib file. It will create a file with your-tex-file-name.bib based on the
% name of your .tex file. In your case you would just use your regular
% .bib file (edited to match the corrections made here)
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@techreport{anderson2012,
    title = {Alcohol in the {European Union}: {WHO} Regional Office {Europe}},
    author = {P. Anderson and L. M{\o}ller and G. Galea},
    url  = {http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/160680/e96457.pdf},
    year = {2012}
}
\end{filecontents}
% self-contained stuff ends here 
\usepackage[]{apacite}
\usepackage{url}
\title{Brief Article}
\author{The Author}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
stuff \cite{anderson2012}

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}  

As others have noted, you need to compile using latex, bibtex, latex, latex to get references to resolve correctly. See:

• Question mark or bold citation key instead of citation number

If you want to automate this using TeXShop, you can use one of the latexmk engines included with it. For instructions on getting it to work see:

• can't get latexmk to work in TeXShop