APA class?

[Peter Davis]

I'm doing a paper that's supposed to be in APA format, about which I
know very little. I see that there's an APA LaTeX class. Is that
reasonably conformant?

I don't have my references in any kind of database. Is it easy enough
to enter them to get suitable APA references and bibliography?

Thanks very much.

-pd


--
----
Peter Davis
The Tech Curmudgeon
http://www.techcurmudgeon.com

[azrazer]

Le 08/12/2011 15:39, Peter Davis a écrit :
> I'm doing a paper that's supposed to be in APA format, about which I
> know very little. I see that there's an APA LaTeX class. Is that
> reasonably conformant?

Yes it is, here is the first paragraph of the documentation :
apa.cls is a LaTeX2e class file that makes your document conform to
the American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual (Fifth
Edition, 2001) specifications for manuscripts or to the APA journal
look found in journals like the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
In addition, it provides a regular LaTeX-like output with a few
enhancements and APA-motivated changes.

> I don't have my references in any kind of database. Is it easy enough
> to enter them to get suitable APA references and bibliography?

Yes, references and bibliography style are set by this class (and the
bst files from the apacite package), you just need to convert your
references to a bibtex file !
> Thanks very much.
Have fun,
azra.
>
> -pd
>
>

[Peter Davis]

On 12/8/2011 10:13 AM, azrazer wrote:
> Le 08/12/2011 15:39, Peter Davis a écrit :
>> I'm doing a paper that's supposed to be in APA format, about which I
>> know very little. I see that there's an APA LaTeX class. Is that
>> reasonably conformant?
> Yes it is, here is the first paragraph of the documentation :
> apa.cls is a LaTeX2e class file that makes your document conform to
> the American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual (Fifth
> Edition, 2001) specifications for manuscripts or to the APA journal
> look found in journals like the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
> In addition, it provides a regular LaTeX-like output with a few
> enhancements and APA-motivated changes.

Thank you. Sounds like exactly what I was looking for.

>> I don't have my references in any kind of database. Is it easy enough
>> to enter them to get suitable APA references and bibliography?
> Yes, references and bibliography style are set by this class (and the
> bst files from the apacite package), you just need to convert your
> references to a bibtex file !

Ah. That's what I was hoping to avoid. Creating a BibTeX file by hand
seems more cumbersome than just typing the bibliography entries.
Actually, I have them in MS-Word format (One of my colleagues uses
Word), so maybe I can find a way to convert them.

Thank you.

-pd

--
----

[toto]

Hello,

I suggest the following to my students (at least it works for science
and articles not so much for books) :
1. copy paste the title of the paper you are looking for on google (or
google scholar)
2. One of the hint should lead you directly to the corresponding
journal and article
3. Most of the publisher (except at least IEEE) allow to download the
reference file for free in different format, bibtex, ris, endnote...
4. If you have the bibtex format perfect if not use jabref for exemple
to import the endnote format and to save it in biblatex format

That its and it is quite efficient.

Hope this help, sincerely yours,

Me

[Lee Rudolph]

I believe (but can't swear) that Endnote can turn (possibly with
more than minimal operator attention) Word-formatted citations
into Endnote-formatted citations; and I also believe that there
are several ways available (all of quality unknown to me) to
automatically convert Endnote-formatted citations to bibtex
entries.

Beware, by the way, that there have been a couple of editions of
the APA manual since the fifth, and that (according to a blog
entry I read on the APA Manual's official blog; which doesn't
mean it's necessarily a correct statement of APA policy) among
other (possibly small) changes, there's at least one biggish
change: whereas in earlier editions, the APA Manual allowed
a certain number of US cities (13, I think), including
Baltimore and Philadelphia, to be listed simply by name
in the address field of a book, it now recommends (and may
require) that all US city names be followed by the two-letter
state abbreviation (e.g., Baltimore, MD and Philadelphia, PA),
and all non-US city names be followed by the two-letter
country code. --Or so I have been given to understand.
That sounds very odd, I admit. (And it particularly
annoys me, at the moment, since many of the books in my
most recent bibliography date from times when their cities
of publication were not yet *in* DE, to name the main
example; or else were, like Stettin, but now aren't.)

Perhaps in the best Usenet tradition, my stating a
palpable unlikelihood will lead someone who actually
knows the truth to correct me publically.

Lee Rudolph

[Peter Davis]

On 12/8/2011 12:09 PM, toto wrote:
> Hello,
>

>>> Le 08/12/2011 15:39, Peter Davis a �crit :

Great! I was not aware of this, but it certainly sounds very helpful.

Thank you!

[azrazer]

Hello,
You are so right, the apa package is outdated and no longer maintained
(well i actually got a review saying that i did not format my article
correctly for apa style though i used apa.cls... so i should have been
aware of that...)

Please try the apa6 package by B.D. Beitzel :
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/apa6

Good luck !

azrA.

[Peter Davis]

azrazer <dsf...@poupidoup.com> writes:

> Please try the apa6 package by B.D. Beitzel :
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/apa6

Thanks for the pointer! Good to know.

-pd

--
Peter Davis

[Peter Flynn]

On 08/12/11 16:58, Peter Davis wrote:
> On 12/8/2011 10:13 AM, azrazer wrote:

>> Le 08/12/2011 15:39, Peter Davis a �crit :

>>> I'm doing a paper that's supposed to be in APA format, about which I
>>> know very little. I see that there's an APA LaTeX class. Is that
>>> reasonably conformant?
>> Yes it is, here is the first paragraph of the documentation :
>> apa.cls is a LaTeX2e class file that makes your document conform to
>> the American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual (Fifth
>> Edition, 2001) specifications for manuscripts or to the APA journal
>> look found in journals like the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
>> In addition, it provides a regular LaTeX-like output with a few
>> enhancements and APA-motivated changes.
>
> Thank you. Sounds like exactly what I was looking for.

I have a student using apa and it seems to work just fine (one caveat
below).

>>> I don't have my references in any kind of database. Is it easy enough
>>> to enter them to get suitable APA references and bibliography?
>> Yes, references and bibliography style are set by this class (and the
>> bst files from the apacite package), you just need to convert your
>> references to a bibtex file !
>
> Ah. That's what I was hoping to avoid. Creating a BibTeX file by hand
> seems more cumbersome than just typing the bibliography entries.

It only *seems* that way. Once you have done the initial donkey-work, I
think you will appreciate the massive saving in future time.

> Actually, I have them in MS-Word format (One of my colleagues uses
> Word), so maybe I can find a way to convert them.

If they are in the new Word bibliographic format in a .docx file, then
they can probably be converted from the OOXML document direct to BIBTeX.

If they are just typed as text, then all bets are off, I'm afraid: what
that provides is just hamburger and what you need is the original cow.
Converting them automagically from unadorned text is virtually
impossible, as there is no easy way for a program to identify what the
component parts of the reference are, unless you have an incredibly
consistent layout.

I *strongly* recommend using Zotero (a Firefox plugin), which lets you
gather references from library/publisher/journal/bookseller web sites,
and then export them in BIBTeX format. If you have a large number of
references in Word, it might be worthwhile re-gathering them using
Zotero instead of copying and pasting them. If you can't use Firefox,
then there is a standalone program with similar functionality to Zotero
called Mendeley. Both are free.

///Peter

[Peter Flynn]

On 09/12/11 22:19, Peter Flynn wrote:
> I have a student using apa and it seems to work just fine (one caveat
> below).

Sorry, forgot the caveat. The apacite format used by default in the
apaclass requires that distinct authors who share the same name be
represented differently (I think I have this right). In my student's
case, references exported from Papers (Mac biblio database) were
inconsistent, and had different formats (surname, inits vs. init.
surname vs. forename surname vs. surname, forename) for the *same*
author. The apacite.bst was adding an unwanted initial.

I found a solution (to a related but different problem) which worked as
a temporary fix at
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18954/apacite-suppress-initials-intext
(the real solution, of course, is to edit the BIBTeX file to achieve
consistency).

All this stuff will presumably disappear as biblatex takes over.

///Peter

[pk]

For references, if you are using biblatex+biber instead of plain bibtex, there is an APA 6th edition style for references - biblatex-apa. It automates all of the major requirements of APA references and citations, including automatic name and name list disambiguation (see examples 6.12 and 6.14 in the APA 6th manual). This is completely impossible with any plain bibtex style.

[Peter Davis]

I don't even know what the choices are. Why would I chose biblatex (+ biber) over just bibtex?

FWIW, I have now spent the better part of today trying to get a very simple document working, with no success. I was able to get BibTeX citations for about half my sources, but I've tried to do the other half by hand. I have carefully checked for balanced { and }, commas, etc., and yet I get errors when I try to build this with MiKTeX 2.9 on Win 7. I can't even run bibtex from a command line ... I just get

I couldn't open file name 'blahblahblah.aux'

I've tried bibtex'ing in TeXWorks, and LaTeX'ing the file in TeXWorks and in Emacs. No joy anywhere.

Is there any way to debug bibtex? LaTeX *seems* to be complaining about \begin{APACrefURL} being terminated by \end{thebibliography} though, as I said, I've checked the balance of everything repeatedly. The errors are:

Runaway argument?
{http://dx.doi.org/10.1371\end {APACrefURL} \PrintBackRefs {\CurrentBib \ETC.
! Paragraph ended before \url was complete.
<to be read again>
\par
l.278


! LaTeX Error: \begin{APACrefURL} on input line 275 ended by \end{thebibliograp
hy}.


Thanks!
-pd

[Lars Madsen]

Well, it is impossible to help without any code. I guess most of us have
never heard of or even used APA, so a small document that (in your view)
should be compilable, would be nice.


--
/daleif

DK-TUG president
memoir and mh bundle maintainer

[Peter Flynn]

On 11/12/11 21:27, Peter Davis wrote:
> I don't even know what the choices are. Why would I chose biblatex
> (+ biber) over just bibtex?

BIBTeX is old and has serious memory and character set limitations, but
there are a lot of styles available and it is very deeply entrenched.

biblatex is more modern and up to date, and does most of its work inside
LaTeX, using the bibtex program only for sorting and preliminary output.
biblatex is not yet compatible with all other packages (as far as I
understand; happy to be corrected).

Biber is a replacement engine for the bibtex program which overcomes the
problems mentioned above.

FWIW, use biblatex if possible, unless it conflicts with some other
package you are using, or unless it doesn't yet have the output style
you need.

> FWIW, I have now spent the better part of today trying to get a very
> simple document working, with no success.

Can you describe more precisely what 'no success' means?
No output at all?

> I was able to get BibTeX
> citations for about half my sources, but I've tried to do the other
> half by hand. I have carefully checked for balanced { and }, commas,
> etc., and yet I get errors when I try to build this with MiKTeX 2.9
> on Win 7. I can't even run bibtex from a command line ... I just
> get

You haven't told us what you are typing. It should be

C:\whatever\> bibtex filename

where <filename> is the name of your *LaTeX* document, without the .tex
(*NOT* the name of your BIBTeX file).

> I couldn't open file name 'blahblahblah.aux'

That could be because you are trying to run BIBTeX against a bibtex
file. It needs to be run against your LaTeX document name. It will pick
up everything else it needs from the .aux file of your LaTeX document.

Or it could be because you are not in the folder where your LaTeX
document lives, so it can't find the .aux file.

Or you haven't yet run your .tex file through LaTeX.

Or something. We need more information.

> I've tried bibtex'ing in TeXWorks, and LaTeX'ing the file in TeXWorks
> and in Emacs. No joy anywhere.

You haven't told us what file you had open at the time.
It must be your LaTeX document, not the BIBTeX file.

> Is there any way to debug bibtex?

Your file or the bibtex.exe program?
For your file, yes, open it in JabRef, fix any errors, and save it.
For the program, not this side of the epoch.

> LaTeX *seems* to be complaining
> about \begin{APACrefURL} being terminated by \end{thebibliography}
> though, as I said, I've checked the balance of everything repeatedly.
> The errors are:
>
> Runaway argument? {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371\end {APACrefURL}
> \PrintBackRefs {\CurrentBib \ETC. ! Paragraph ended before \url was
> complete. <to be read again> \par l.278

OK, that's something completely different. What is the entry in your
BIBTeX file that this refers to?

If this is a DOI field type, I believe it shouldn't have any
dereferencing information in it, eg it should be the bare DOI

doi = {10.371},

not

doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371}

But I'd need to look this up, and I'm out of time right now.

///Peter

[Peter Davis]

Thanks. I wasn't sure if posting attachments was acceptable here, or if I had to make Web-accessible copies of the tex and bib files.

Actually, at the moment, things seem to be working, though I still don't know what broke it or what fixed it. I suspect manually deleting all the aux, blb, etc. files and re-running TeXWorks may have solved it.

If I continue to have problems, I'll send attachments.

Thank you,
-pd

[Simon Spiegel]

On 2011-12-11 21:27:33 +0000, Peter Davis said:

> I don't even know what the choices are. Why would I chose biblatex (+
> biber) over just bibtex?

Very short summary: bibtex is the past, biblatex is the future. If
you're not forced to use bibtex for some reason (because a journal
requires it, because you're already heavily invested in bibtex etc.),
forget about traditional bibtex and use biblatex and biber.

Simon

[Peter Davis]

Peter Flynn <pe...@silmaril.ie> writes:
> On 11/12/11 21:27, Peter Davis wrote:
>> I don't even know what the choices are. Why would I chose biblatex
>> (+ biber) over just bibtex?
>
> BIBTeX is old and has serious memory and character set limitations,
> but there are a lot of styles available and it is very deeply
> entrenched.
>
> biblatex is more modern and up to date, and does most of its work
> inside LaTeX, using the bibtex program only for sorting and
> preliminary output. biblatex is not yet compatible with all other
> packages (as far as I understand; happy to be corrected).
>
> Biber is a replacement engine for the bibtex program which overcomes
> the problems mentioned above.
>
> FWIW, use biblatex if possible, unless it conflicts with some other
> package you are using, or unless it doesn't yet have the output style
> you need.

Thanks for the clarifying info. I managed to get BibTeX working for
this purpose, a single paper with only about a dozen references, so
doing it by hand wasn't too painful.

I'm no expert, but it seems to be that styles should be a property of
the document class, and not the bibliographic database.

>
>> FWIW, I have now spent the better part of today trying to get a very
>> simple document working, with no success.
>
> Can you describe more precisely what 'no success' means?
> No output at all?

That's what I tried to explain in the following.

>
>> I couldn't open file name 'blahblahblah.aux'
>
> That could be because you are trying to run BIBTeX against a bibtex
> file. It needs to be run against your LaTeX document name. It will
> pick up everything else it needs from the .aux file of your LaTeX
> document.

Yup, that was it (at least one of the problems I was having.)

>> Is there any way to debug bibtex?
>
> Your file or the bibtex.exe program?
> For your file, yes, open it in JabRef, fix any errors, and save it.
> For the program, not this side of the epoch.

;^) I meant my file, but the other info is useful too. I had the file
open in emacs with AucTeX, and that provides a function to validate the
syntax of the BibTeX file. It claimed everything was syntactically
correct, even as I was getting the errors.

Perhaps the problem was as simply as my not processing the right files
in the right order. I found that:

a) Trying to process in TeXWorks, with the typesetting process set to
"pdfLaTeX, makeindex and bibtex" gave me these unbalanced environment
errors. (See below.)

b) I couldn't run bibtex from the command line (probably because I was
trying to specify the BibTeX file instead of the LaTeX file.)

c) I didn't see a way to run bibtex within Emacs, perhaps because I only
looked while editing a BibTeX buffer, and not the LaTeX buffer.

>> LaTeX *seems* to be complaining
>> about \begin{APACrefURL} being terminated by \end{thebibliography}
>> though, as I said, I've checked the balance of everything
> repeatedly.
>> The errors are:
>>
>> Runaway argument? {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371\end {APACrefURL}
>> \PrintBackRefs {\CurrentBib \ETC. ! Paragraph ended before \url was
>> complete. <to be read again> \par l.278
>
> OK, that's something completely different. What is the entry in your
> BIBTeX file that this refers to?

I could not identify which entry was at fault. Line 278 is past the
last text in the BibTeX file.

> But I'd need to look this up, and I'm out of time right now.

Thanks to you and everyone who's responded here. I did manage to get it
working, finally, and now I understand it a bit better for next time.
Curiously, I've used LaTeX for years (since before there was a 2e, I
think), but never used BibTeX before.

Cheers,

[Robin Fairbairns]

Peter Davis <p...@pfdstudio.com> writes:

> Thanks for the clarifying info. I managed to get BibTeX working for
> this purpose, a single paper with only about a dozen references, so
> doing it by hand wasn't too painful.
>
> I'm no expert, but it seems to be that styles should be a property of
> the document class, and not the bibliographic database.

yes, but you're missing a two other entities, which are the .bst
(bibliography style file) and the latex code that actually provides the
citation commands that the .bst emits. together, these two provide a
bridge between the bibtex source file (.bib) and the document.

the problem with ideas of "belonging" arises when the .bst/typesetting
combination has general applicability. one could have a foo.cls and a
bar.cls, both of which work with the output of baz.bst -- whose is
baz.bst?

the area has been more carefully thought through (it seems to me) in the
development of biblatex, where you have a citation engine (say,
biblatex-apa) that goes with the class (say, apa6).

(quite apart from anything else, bibtex dates from so long ago that
there was little expectation of any support from elsewhere, for any
enterprise -- for all of my period writing stuff with citations in it, i
was using bibtex 0.99c, which dates back to 1988 when i was learning
latex. bibtex 0.99d was released last year ... i shall probably never
use it, given that we have biblatex now!)
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
my address is @cl.cam.ac.uk, regardless of the header. sorry about that.

[Peter Flynn]

On 12/12/11 14:25, Peter Davis wrote:
[...]

> Thanks for the clarifying info. I managed to get BibTeX working for
> this purpose, a single paper with only about a dozen references, so
> doing it by hand wasn't too painful.

That's good news.

> I'm no expert, but it seems to be that styles should be a property of
> the document class, and not the bibliographic database.

That would certainly apply to individual journal document classes, where
the bib style is invariable. Probably also to publishers' book classes,
for the same reason. And possibly to thesis classes, modulo the
institution's degree of flexibility in allowing different styles for
different disciplines.

But the generic classes (article, book, report) need to be able to use
whatever the author specifies. And certainly the styles should never be
the property of the bib database, which has to remain style-free at all
times, to allow authors to re-use the entries in any style.

>> That could be because you are trying to run BIBTeX against a bibtex
>> file.
>

> Yup, that was it (at least one of the problems I was having.)

Aha. It would be hugely useful to those who write documentation to know
where you looked for help on this and didn't find it, because it means
that this aspect isn't being emphasised as it should.

> ;^) I meant my file, but the other info is useful too. I had the file
> open in emacs with AucTeX, and that provides a function to validate the
> syntax of the BibTeX file. It claimed everything was syntactically
> correct, even as I was getting the errors.

That's perfectly possible, if it's the bib style that is broken, rather
than your data. On the other hand, there are so many variables in
bibliographic work, that sometimes you'll hit a combination that simply
isn't provided for (eg a book with no author :-)

> Perhaps the problem was as simply as my not processing the right files
> in the right order. I found that:
>
> a) Trying to process in TeXWorks, with the typesetting process set to
> "pdfLaTeX, makeindex and bibtex" gave me these unbalanced environment
> errors. (See below.)

Leave makeindex out of the equation for the moment, as it doesn't have
any effect on the bibliography formatting (or at least, it shouldn't :-)

> b) I couldn't run bibtex from the command line (probably because I was
> trying to specify the BibTeX file instead of the LaTeX file.)

You mean the bibtex.exe program ran, but couldn't find any file with the
.aux filetype for the filename you gave it.

> c) I didn't see a way to run bibtex within Emacs, perhaps because I only
> looked while editing a BibTeX buffer, and not the LaTeX buffer.

Right. It's C-c TAB. Not very intuitable; C-c b would have made more sense.

>>> LaTeX *seems* to be complaining
>>> about \begin{APACrefURL} being terminated by \end{thebibliography}
>>> though, as I said, I've checked the balance of everything
>> repeatedly.
>>> The errors are:
>>>
>>> Runaway argument? {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371\end {APACrefURL}
>>> \PrintBackRefs {\CurrentBib \ETC. ! Paragraph ended before \url was
>>> complete.<to be read again> \par l.278
>>
>> OK, that's something completely different. What is the entry in your
>> BIBTeX file that this refers to?
>
> I could not identify which entry was at fault.

You should be able to: it's the one with the DOI "http://dx.doi.org/10.1371"

> Line 278 is past the last text in the BibTeX file.

It's the .bbl file that the error refers to. This is the formatted
output from BIBTeX that actually gets used in your document. This is a
LaTeX error -- at this stage BIBTeX has been and gone and done its stuff
and left behind the .bbl file for LaTeX to process.

If you look backwards from this error (in your LaTeX logfile or log
bufer or wherever it was you saw this error), you'll find the name of
the most recent file opened.

> Thanks to you and everyone who's responded here. I did manage to get it
> working, finally, and now I understand it a bit better for next time.
> Curiously, I've used LaTeX for years (since before there was a 2e, I
> think), but never used BibTeX before.

http://latex.silmaril.ie/formattinginformation/textuality.html#bib

///Peter