Errors: Class apa6: No bibliography package specified; Citation undefined

Question

Hej!

I am a super beginner and I tried to write an assignment in apa style for which I downloaded apa6 and apacite. However, I cannot seem to make the references work. There is no bibliography and in-text it shows the citations as "(?, ?)" and I really have no clue about what I am doing wrong and nothing I found in these forums and others could solve the issue (I already tried the pdflatex-bibtex-pdflatex(2x) sequence which is the standard in Texmaker and loads of variations of adding or deleted parts of the code). I think I might actually be missing how this is all working in latex.

I am using Windows 10, MiKTeX, and texmaker.

To test this all out, I created this example template to understand which parts are not working.

\documentclass[a4paper,man,british]{apa6}

\usepackage[british]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage{apacite}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\justifying


\bibliographystyle{apacite}


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\title{Long Sample Banana Title : How APA can be used for your Banana Article}
\shorttitle{Short Sample Banana Title}
\author{Mr Bananaman}
\affiliation{Some banana university}

\abstract{About bananas}
\keywords{banana, love}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

Things are often bananas.

\section{Bananas: A declaration of love}
Banana banana banana banana \cite{ex25-t1}

\subsection{Bananas are yellow}
Banana banana banana. \citeA{bananacite} banana.

\subsection{They taste heavenly}
Banana banana \citeyear{bananacite}.

\section{Conclusion}
Bananas are everything.

\bibliography{bananarefs}
\end{document}

with this bananarefs.bib-file:

@Article{bananacite,
author = {banana man},
title = {banana test citation},
journal = {banana publishing},
year = {2023},
}

@book{ex25-t1,
  author         = {Vygotsky, L. S.},
  year           = {1978},
  title          = {Mind in Society: {T}he Development of Higher Mental
                    Processes},
  editor         = {Rice, Edgar},
  address        = {Cambridge, MA},
  publisher      = {Harvard University Press},
}

gives these errors:

...
Class apa6 Info: No bibliography package was specified; defaulting to (but not
loading) Biblatex on input line 213

...
LaTeX Warning: Citation `ex25-t1' undefined on input line 33.
No file "apa test".bbl

Again, everything is fine with the apa style in the pdf, only the citations show as "(?, ?)" or "? (?)" depending on my citation in the text and no reference list in the end.

I hope someone understands what is going wrong and enlighten me.

Answer 1

• the class apa6 is special, instead of loading the apacite package, it has a document class option for that. This will also deal with the style, so \bibliographystyle{...} is not necessary

• \bibliography{bananarefs} is missing

---

\documentclass[a4paper,man,british,apacite]{apa6}

\usepackage[british]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
%\usepackage{apacite}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\justifying

%\bibliographystyle{apacite}


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\title{Long Sample Banana Title : How APA can be used for your Banana Article}
\shorttitle{Short Sample Banana Title}
\author{Mr Bananaman}
\affiliation{Some banana university}

\abstract{About bananas}
\keywords{banana, love}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

Things are often bananas.

\section{Bananas: A declaration of love}
Banana banana banana banana \cite{ex25-t1}
\bibliography{bananarefs}

\end{document}

Answer 2

I suggest you check out the manual of apa6 and have a look at the examples.

To be concrete: Remove apacite and use biblatex instead. Use \textcite and \parencite as citation commands. At the end print the bibliography with \printbibliography:

\documentclass[a4paper,man,british]{apa6}
\usepackage[british]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
%\usepackage{apacite}
\usepackage{ragged2e}
\justifying

\usepackage[style=apa,sortcites=true,sorting=nyt,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
\addbibresource{bananarefs.bib}
%\bibliographystyle{apacite}


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

\title{Long Sample Banana Title : How APA can be used for your Banana Article}
\shorttitle{Short Sample Banana Title}
\author{Mr Bananaman}
\affiliation{Some banana university}

\abstract{About bananas}
\keywords{banana, love}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

Things are often bananas.

\section{Bananas: A declaration of love}
Banana banana banana banana \textcite{ex25-t1}

\subsection{Bananas are yellow}
Banana banana banana. \parencite{bananacite} banana.

\subsection{They taste heavenly}
Banana banana \citeyear{bananacite}.

\section{Conclusion}
Bananas are everything.

%\bibliography{bananarefs}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

If you are still having problems, try to run it from the shell: pdflatex yourfile.tex. If the citations are undefined, run biber yourfile.bcf and then pdflatex again. (Note that these are instructions for GNU/Linux, they will not work on Windows.)