APA 5th edition problems

[jdien]

Hi,
I just realized that Bookends isn't following the APA 5th edition style guide properly but I'm worried it may not be fixable. The first thing is simple. The format that comes with Bookends is set to use "and" instead of "&" in the text. I was easily able to edit this by hand but it should be fixed for the next Bookends release. The second thing looks problematical. According to the style guide, for citations with 3-5 authors, all of them should be listed the first time the citation appears in the text and for subsequent appearances the citation should be written as the first author followed by et al. I can't see any way to get Bookends to do this though. Can this be fixed? This would be a major hassle for submitting Psychology manuscripts.

Joe

[Jon]

This specific example is discussed in the User Guide if I'm not mistaken (do a search for APA).

The solution lies in creating a custom citation format for APA citations. Then you can have the first/subsequent citations output exactly as you like.

Jon
Sonny Software

[jdien]

Ah, I found it! Is there a reason for intentionally shipping Bookends with an incomplete APA 5th edition format? Anyway, I tried to fix it, following the example in the manual but it still isn't working. I guess I'm doing something wrong? I edited the APA 5th edition format. When I changed the "and" to "&" it worked fine. Following what it said in the manual, I copied the format string into the secondary order field and changed the pop-up to "Surname Only et al.". Anyway, thanks for helping!

Joe

[Jon]

The reason is simply that I'm not all that confident in my own understanding of what people expect. If you want to return to me what you think is correct, I'd be happy to distribute that, too.

Did you do that for each of the Types you have? If you do it just for Journal Articles (the first) and not Books, for example, it won't work as you want for books.

Jon
Sonny Software

[jdien]

I just sent you my version of the APA 5th Edition format. I didn't go through everything systematically (start of the term is crazy for me) but should be a step in the right direction. Thanks for the help!

Joe

[jzacks]

I think there's one more problem with the APA bibliographic style, and I don't see how to fix it. Suppose you have two citations by authors with the same last name but different first names, e.g.:

"Here are two papers by people with the same last name (Miller, 1956a; Miller and Cohen, 2001).

References
Miller, E. K., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 167-202.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97."

This was formatted with the included APA 5th filter. APA style specifies that the in-text citations should disambiguate the same-surname authors by including first initials, i.e., "Here are two papers by people with the same last name (E. K. Miller and Cohen, 2001; G. A. Miller, 1956a)." [Note that in this case the sort order also changes because E comes before G.]

I can't see any way to do this. Any suggestions?

(BTW, I also don't know why Bookends added the "a" after 1956; any guesses how to fix this?)

Thanks,

Jeff

[Jon]

This was formatted with the included APA 5th filter. APA style specifies that the in-text citations should disambiguate the same-surname authors by including first initials, i.e., "Here are two papers by people with the same last name (E. K. Miller and Cohen, 2001; G. A. Miller, 1956a)." [Note that in this case the sort order also changes because E comes before G.]

I can't see any way to do this. Any suggestions?

I think the only way to handle this is to do it manually -- make the citation self-deleting like this

{!Miller, 2005}

and enter the final citation the way you want it to appear.

(BTW, I also don't know why Bookends added the "a" after 1956; any guesses how to fix this?)

Try downloading Bookends again. There was a bug in the initial release of 8.1.1 that was caught the same day and fixed in a silent update. If that still doesn't work properly, contact me directly.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Waystone]

Another problem showing up in my APA 5th template is that author's names are in all caps.

To be honest, I'm just not expert enough with either Bookends or APA format to tweak this myself, and without it, the usefulness of Bookends (which seems an awesome program so far) for me is severely curtailed.

Any chance that particular format will be brought up to speed soon?

[Jon]

Sounds like you may have changed some settings inadvertently. The version we ship doesn't call for ALL CAPS.

If you don't want to edit it yourself, email me and I'll send you the one we ship.

Jon
Sonny Software