APA citations and bibliographies

Question

I'm new to TeX, and am struggling to format the citations and bibliography as I want them for my thesis (written in Overleaf). I have tried countless packages and different citation/bibliography styles and have searched and read relevant forum threads. Yet, I'm stuck. Apologies if this has been answered before, but I would greatly appreciate some help as this is causing me great trouble and I have to submit my thesis in less than a week. I have attached a sample .bib reference below. The full 'references' file is imported from my Mendeley library.

In-text citations should be in the format:

text requiring reference (Toledo 2009).

Bibliography should be APA style, as below, or roughly similar.

Toledo, L. F. and Haddad, C. F. B. (2009) Colors and Some Morphological Traits as Defensive Mechanisms in Anurans. International Journal of Zoology 2, 1-12.

So far, I have had greatest success without specifying any packages in the preamble, and only using..:

\bibliographystyle{apalike} 
\bibliography{references}

...in the end of my document.

However, it is not quite right, because in-text citations have square brackets and separate author from year with a comma. The bibliography looks all right, it only needs to not repeat the square-bracketed citation (as it appears in-text) at the beginning...

Please take pity and help.

@article{Toledo2009,
    title = {{Colors and Some Morphological Traits as Defensive Mechanisms in Anurans}},
    year = {2009},
    journal = {International Journal of Zoology},
    author = {Toledo, Luís Felipe and Haddad, Célio F. B.},
    pages = {1--12},
    volume = {2},
    isbn = {1687-8477{\textbackslash}r1687-8485},
    doi = {10.1155/2009/910892},
    issn = {1687-8477},
    pmid = {17969693}
}

Answer 1

So for APA writing, you can use the apa6 Latex class that can help format things into APA as far as the paper styling and citations are concerned. (http://ctan.sharelatex.com/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/apa6/apa6.pdf)

However, if you are writing a thesis, you can use the following

\usepackage{natbib} #Loads cite commands

\bibliographystyle{apa} #Tells Latex your bibliography style
\bibliography{BIBFILE} #Replace BIBFILE with the name of your bibliography file

Generally, I like to have my references in a .bib format and import them into my documents as I did above rather than merging them in the same document.

To cite things in text, you can use \cite{citekey} for Author (YEAR) output, and \citep{citekey} for (Author, YEAR).

Latex should format the authors based on the APA manual. If not, there is the apacite package, but I am not too sure how that works on a standard article class document or report class for this matter.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

If you're supposed to be formatting the bibliographic entries according to (current) APA guidelines, you should looking into using the apacite bibliography style and the apacite citation management package.

The apalike bibliography style was last updated meaningfully in 1988 and thus doesn't come close to implementing current APA guidelines.

Note the use of & rather than and as the conjunction between the author names in a two-author piece, in both the parenthesis-style citation call-out and the formatted bibliographic item.

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@article{Toledo2009,
    title = {Colors and Some Morphological Traits as Defensive Mechanisms in Anurans},
    year   = {2009},
    journal= {International Journal of Zoology},
    author = {Toledo, Luís Felipe and Haddad, Célio F. B.},
    pages  = {1--12},
    volume = {2009},
    isbn   = {1687-8477{\textbackslash}r1687-8485},
    doi    = {10.1155/2009/910892},
    issn   = {1687-8477},
    pmid   = {17969693}
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\usepackage{xurl}
\urlstyle{same}

\begin{document}
\cite{Toledo2009} % or "\citeA{...}" for "textual-style" citation call-out
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}