Hi Justin,
On Dec 24, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Justin Harford wrote:
Yeah I was thinking he would just use bibtex. I mean its only
difficult to get started but once he has the distribution and
necessary packages for his APA style, writing a bib file is not a
big deal at all as it requires less coding than the bibliography
method that you demonstrated.
I was assuming that Scott already had a version of his paper and
bibliography that he could try out in LaTeX as a test, with only a few
sample reference entries to check that this works. I did think of
going directly to BibTex, but then I realized that in addition to
setting up the LaTeX software and style packages for the first time,
he'd also have to find out the fields that APA style requires for each
type of reference. For example, articles require the full page range.
In the case of journals with issue numbers as well as volumes, that
also needs to be an included field (e.g., "number = {2}").
Specifications of required fields for books are usually even more
style specific than for articles. There may only be a few citation
types he needs to use in practice, like article, book, inproceedings,
etc. (see: http://nwalsh.com/tex/texhelp/bibtx-7.html for details),
but he'd need the entry field names and a template pattern. It's
usually not hard if there is someone working in the same area who can
give you sample files. It's more of a nuisance for someone who
doesn't use these styles or style files to pick this up from scratch.
Look
@article{ref1,
title = {interesting psychological article},
author = {Justin Harford},
date = {12/24/08},
}
You'd just be typing most of that anyway, the most complicated stuff
yu get here is {} and of a comma here and there, but something like
that becomes pretty easy after a while.
Practically speaking, the following would be a fairer example of an
article reference and its entry in a .bib file:
Deutsch, F. M., Lussier, J. B., \& Servusm, L. J. (1993). Husbands
at home: Predictors of parental participation in childcare and
housework. {\it Journal of Personality and Social Psychology}, 65,
1154--1166.
@ARTICLE{deutsch93,
author={F. M. Deutsch and {Lussier}, J. B. and {Servusm}, L. J.},
title={Husbands at home: Predictors of parental participation in
childcare and housework},
journal={Journal of Personality and Social Psychology},
year={1993},
volume={65},
pages={1154-1166}
}
In the document you'd just have to type
\bibliographystyle{APA}
\bibliography{file}
where you tell it the name of your .bib file database which should
be in the same folder. and
\nocite{*}
which seems to just make the process move along better. Esther, do
you know what that means?
\nocite{*} means that LaTeX with BibTeX will list all the entries in
your bibliography file (the argument to \bibliography -- in the case
you gave, a file named file.bib) whether or not these references were
cited in the paper. This means that if you ran through a minimal file
for the paper, just to generate the references, you could still print
out all the entries in file.bib. Otherwise, LaTeX looks through your
manuscript for citations (again, for your example these might be
command sequences like \cite{ref1} ) and only lists bibliographic
entries for cited references that it finds in file.bib. This lets you
keep a single, master bibliographic file for all your papers, or for
all your papers on a particular topic, if you want.
Most journals that accept electronic submissions in TeX format don't
accept .bib bibliography files as inputs or separate submissions.
Even if you use BibTeX to generate the formatted paper, they require
that you insert the .bbl file in the place where you have those
arguments for \bibliographystyle and \bibliography{file}. This is
for the same reason that Scott says his instructors want the Word
document -- the editors want to work with a file that has the complete
text in a version they can copyedit and then publish. When you run
BibTeX with LaTeX, you actually produce a file that is similar to the
examples I typed in for Scott -- the main difference is that LaTeX
will insert spacing commands for the hanging indents at the correct
location in each reference, and no added definition at the beginning
of each reference will be needed to do this. So the .bbl file is
basically the set of LaTeX entries for a bibliography that you can
send along to a LaTeX installation that never has to run BibTeX at
all, or know about specific style files.
The worst part about this is that you have to figure out how to use
the style file for APA, but once you get that all sorted out, things
work relatively normally.
Regards
Justin Harford
Yes, but there's still a learning curve. Another possibility is using
a GUI-front end like BibDesk for inputting .bib entries. That may
help a little (at least with minor things like remembering to separate
fields with a comma).
Scott, the idea behind style files in LaTeX is that you can easily
switch formatting without having retype your paper with new formatting
commands. For the main paper, you might change a single argument that
lets you change the output from double-spaced manuscript mode to
single-spaced, publication-ready mode (possibly formatted for 2-
columns, or whatever else the journal uses). For bibliography styles,
this means that you can change an argument that lets you change
between referencing formats without retyping and reformatting. This
might include automatically numbering references in the order in which
they are used, as opposed to using alphabetical order. Or it might
require the authors' names to be given in a particular order like last
name, comma, first name for the first author, but successive authors
listed by first name then last name. Again, the bibliography style
file can keep track of the conventions, and the capitalization, font
changes, hanging indents, etc.
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
On Dec 24, 2008, at 3:50 PM, Esther wrote:
Hi Scott,
I was going to ask whether you could just submit PDF, too, because
another possibility would be to use LaTeX for your bibliography and
merge the two PDF outputs. The problem with converting to LaTeX is
that the initial learning curve is somewhat steep to get started
composing whole papers in LaTeX unless there are other people in
your class/school who routinely use this, with similar format
requirements, and you've already got enough on your plate. (The
underlying program, TeX, was originally developed by Donald Knuth
as a way to get around the high price of mathematics textbooks
because of the typesetting requirements. As a result, you can
control every aspect of formatting, and publish textbooks with the
results!) However, it's pretty simple to use this just for the
bibliography, which is the part that's giving you problems. I
Googled the APA Style rules and found:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/05/
(Reference List: Basic Rules)
which has:
• All lines after the first line of each entry in your reference
list should be indented one-half inch from the left margin. This is
called hanging indentation.
Apart from having to install TeXShop (which is accessible, and
produces output in PDF format) and the standard TeX package (with
LaTeX, BibTeX, macros, etc.), the actual TeX file for your
references could be pretty simple, and fairly close to what you
typed, with just a few differences. You would need to indicate
font changes by two letter commands preceded by a backslash, and
apply them with brackets:
This is an example of {\it italicized text}.
This is an example of {\bf bold text}.
A few characters, like "&", "#", "$", "{", and "}" are used as
control characters (e.g., see above for use of the right and left
brackets), so if you want to include them as text in references you
have to precede them with a backslash:
Marley \& Me
Then you'd simply need a rule to produce a hanging indentation.
(You should check with your teacher whether this is really 0.5
inches for your style requirements.) Put the definition ("sref" for
Scott's reference command -- there is a \ref command already in
existence) at the start of the file and add the command at the
beginning of each reference entry.
\newcommand\sref{\par\noindent\hangindent=0.5in\hangafter=1}
\sref Green, B. J. (2000) Picture books and teaching science. {\it
Science and Children}, 38, 2, 43--45.
\sref Deutsch, F. M., Lussier, J. B., \& Servusm L. J. (1993).
Husbands at home: Predictors of parental participation in childcare
and
housework. {\it Journal of Personality and Social Psychology}, 65,
1154--1166.
There would be a few more commands to start up the file, choose
line spacing, and default font size, but that's basically al you
would need to do to prepare your references in LaTeX. (Examples of
article entries chosen from the APA Style manual). You could also
reset the starting page number to continue on from the page
numbering in your Word Document and set the page numbering style to
match what you use in Word (e.g., number centered at the bottom or
top, or shown at upper right).
If you really get used to using TeX you can use BibTeX, which is
part of the standard TeX additions. With BibTeX, you include the
style file you want for your bibliography (apa.bst in this case),
and it will take care of the formatting, capitalization, italics,
hanging indents, etc. But you have to create a BibTeX data base,
and that's not worthwhile unless you're going to really need it.
The work goes into creating the database, and the style files will
let you reformat the entries to match any journal's style. It will
even order and number the entries in the case of journals that
require references show up in the order that they're cited in the
paper.
Maybe you could ask about submitting the Word document for the
text, along with a merged PDF file for the references? Also,
unlike Word, which is MicroSoft specific, TeX is free and is
available in distributions that work on all operating system
platforms.
Cheers,
Esther
On Dec 24, 2008, at 12:48 PM, Scott Howell wrote:
Hmmm, good question. I suspect it would be up to the instructor.
THe only reason I may not is I have to provide them a means to
give feedback and they or at least my last instructor made
comments inside the document. So, good question and something I'll
have to check when the next course starts.
tnx
On Dec 24, 2008, at 2:07 PM, Ryan Mann wrote:
Would you absolutely have to turn them in Word format? I'm
asking because I know for a fact that Latex documents can be
converted to PDF format. Maybe you could turn them in that way.
On Dec 24, 2008, at 1:25 PM, Scott Howell wrote:
Justin, I suspect your right, but since these papers are turned
in electronically, I suspect I'll have to turn them in as
Microsoft Word files. If I could convert Latex to Word without
any issues, I might just go that route. The big deal with APA
formatting is it must be double spaced, not a problem in Word,
but the reference page has to have the first part of the
reference against the left margin and indented something like
five spaces. THe problem in WOrd as far as I am concerned is
knowing exactly where the text is. I got dinged for this despite
my best efforts in trying to get the text where it should be.
Thanks for the idea, it is certainly one worth exploring.
On Dec 24, 2008, at 12:48 PM, Justin Harford wrote:
Hi Scott
I've tried open office a bit and it looks to me like you'd
probably have better luck with microsnot word. Have you tried
nisus writer express? I'm not exactly familiar with all the
requirements for writing an APA paper, but if the main place
where you are losing points is in the bibliography, an if the
only matter is indentations, you might just try writing the bib
separately in textedit. It won't do any smart tag stuff
without you knowing and you could just manually format each
entry with whatever it requires.
That said it sounds like you'd be doing a lot more work than yu
need. If you are seriously going to be writing papers like
this for years to come, it might be worth the time invested in
learning how to typeset with LaTeX. I am like 98 percent
confident that LaTeX could make formatting an APA paper a
trivial process if you don't mind a few lines of code here and
there. Again, sure it may not be easy in the beginning, but if
you are going to be writing papers like this for a number of
years, it might be worth it in the long run.
Regards
Justin Harford
Scott Howell
[email protected]
