Latex APA citation and bibliography problems

Question

For my master thesis I am using a Latex template that has been passed down within the faculty for years. I am having trouble getting my references to work. This is part of the code for the main file:

 \documentclass[11pt, a4paper,oneside,openright,titlepage,%fleqn,
             headinclude,footinclude,
           numbers=noenddot,cleardoublepage=empty]{scrreprt}
           
\usepackage[natbib=true, backend=biber,style=apa]{biblatex}
..............
............
\usepackage{apacite}
%\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
%\usepackage{apalike}
\usepackage[printonlyused,smaller,withpage]{acronym}
%\usepackage[style=apa,backend=biber]{biblatex}
%\usepackage[style=apa,backend=biber,natbib]{biblatex}
%\DeclareLanguageMapping{british}{british-apa} 
..............
............
%\bibliographystyle{apalike} % or try abbrvnat or unsrtnat or apalike
%\setcitestyle{authoryear,open={((},close={))}}

%\bibliographystyle{plainnat}

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{references} % refers to refs.bib 

As you can see there are quite some commented options, but no combination of packages gives me the proper references. The apacite does not seem to work, even when adding the [natbibapa]. Some, like apalike just give question marks instead of references, but some break the document all together.

I have no idea what causes the issues, as I could manage this in the past. I expect it has something to do with the special documentclass, but I am not sure. Is there anybody who could help?

Answer 1

apacite and biblatex are incompatible and cannot be used together, because apacite is BibTeX-based and biblatex completely reimplements citation and bibliography handling so that it is not compatible with any BibTeX-based approach. You need to pick only one of the two.

Note that apacite implements APA style according to the 6th edition of the manual. If you want 7th edition APA style, you have to use a current version (>=v9.0) of biblatex-apa. Your document could look like this

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

(You won't need any \DeclareLanguageMapping lines and you cannot have a \bibliographystyle declaration.)

Note that this document needs to be compiled with Biber and not with BibTeX. A full compliation cycle involves running LaTeX, Biber, LaTeX, LaTeX (where "LaTeX" is your favourite flavour of LaTeX: pdfLaTeX, LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX, ...). See Question mark or bold citation key instead of citation number for a wonderful explanation of why that is necessary and Biblatex with Biber: Configuring my editor to avoid undefined citations for help with setting your editor up for Biber (Overleaf users don't need to do anything, Biber will automatically be run by latexmk).

If you want 6th edition APA style with biblatex, use biblatex-apa6's style=apa6

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa6]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

If you want 6th edition APA style and prefer to stick with BibTeX, you can use apacite

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}

\usepackage{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}

\begin{document}
Lorem \cite{article-full}

\bibliography{xampl}
\end{document}

With apacite you need to compile with BibTeX and not with Biber.

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There are reasons why templates that are passed down through generations of students are generally treated with suspicion on this site: Too often bad code accumulates and becomes to unwieldy to handle. If you don't have to use the template, you may want to consider not using it and starting with the bare minimals from scratch. (Depending on how strict your requirements are this can be very easy to quite time consuming.)