________________________________
From: Jacob Bishop <[email protected]>
To: John Kane <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, August 24, 2013 1:38:15 PM
Subject: Re: The tyranny of the APA Manual (more or less on topic)
On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 8:13 AM, John Kane <[email protected]> wrote:
I was poking around the Zotero site trying to see if there was a way to get a
specific APA citation format [Author (date)] which is easy enough in LyX or
LaTeX to work in a word processor such as AOO Writer or MS Word[1]. Well
actually
I don't know if you are aware, but there is a project called Docear4word. See
http://www.docear.org/category/docear4word/ Now, I use LyX for writing papers,
along with JabRef, which uses BibTeX. If I had to use Word, though, I would
probably use Docear4word, because it also works nicely with JabRef.
No I had not heard of it. Seems a bit interesting though I detest Word. I was
one of the beta tester for Excel--my university was a site and I liked it but I
have never liked the design or philosophy of Word.
I use OpenOffice and occasionally LibreOffice but if I were to do all my
writing in them I'd stick with Zotero. Bibtex with JabRef is okay but it really
is just a way to hanle references.
Zotero is a pretty complete bibliographic management system which allows the
storage of articles, etc, within the data base--heck I've got 2 or 3 pdf books
from various places stored there, tagging, linking, and the maintanance of
elaborate notes.
It looks like it was designed by working scholars for working scholars and it
seems to interface pretty smoothly with Word and OpenOffice with that Author
alone problem being one exception
I was finding that Zotero inserts the citation in (Author, Date) format without
allowing modifications as one can when inserting from a bibtex file and hoped
to find a way to avoid having to go back and edit later if it could be done in
a word processor.
>
>I found a discussion of exactly that issue on a Zotero forum and came across a
>reference to the American Psychology Association blog that, as far as I can
>see, is almost exclusively devoted to advice on how to deal with the
>Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. As they say,
>“The APA Style Blog is the
official companion to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological
Association, Sixth Edition”.
>
>I know, from personal experience, that everyone from undergraduates to tenured
>professors obsess over proper referencing but a blog?
Why not? I think things like this help people pull together and deal with the
difficult circumstances. You know, when they feel trapped. It sounds sort of
like an alcoholics anonymous group, but for academics in the social sciences,
who, for one reason or another, just can't stop using APA.
No, no, no, This is not a self-help blog. You need to have a look at the blog.
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/. It is written by what 12 full-time APA
experts in publications
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/apa-style-experts.html. This means by the
experts by the people who turn out all the major APA journals , books and who
maintain or help maintain PsycINFO
It's not some kind of self-help group but a high-powered group of experts
providing advice. As a rough analogy, think of having the R Core Development
team plus a few major package maintainers running a blog.
It speaks to the importance of APA style overall. I think I mentioned in the
earlier discussion of the importance of having an APA6 document class and this
blog seems to strengthen that idea. I believe I mentioned that the APA5 manual
states that over 1000 journals, and students ranging from nursing to nuclear
technology (Personal communication Oct. 2012) use it.
In fact, in poking around the APA site I got the impression that publishing and
supporting APA style is a major industry.
In spite of some of the Manual's insane pickiness, it does provide a common
language and format for reporting a lot of things. You know where to look for
information and exactly in what format to expect it. One does not have to worry
if the authors are reporting measurements in Babylonian cubits or whatever--you
know it's IS0.
Also, come to think of it, in overall form it may well speak to its importance
from a legal perspective as well. If you are a nuclear engineering report on an
accident, a nurse drafting a patient report for official consideration, or a
clinical psychologist preparing for a custody hearing, you all have a stable
template to work from: no one has to re-invent the wheel and everyone receiving
the information knows what they are getting.In many cases it is difficult to
overstate the importance of standardization.
As an aside I worked on a project a few years ago where we were dealing with
data from all across Canada. At the time, when building one of our data bases
we discovered that abbreviations for the various provinces and territories over
the over 30 years of the study had not been standardized. There were 10
provinces and 2 territories. IIRC the analyst had something like 50 lines of
SAS code to recode to the currently accepted provincial/territorial
abbreviations.
Does anyone know of the existence of something like this for any other style
manual?
>
I don't have the slightest idea of how many APA Manual users use LyX or LaTeX
but I think it's very nice that LyX offers it. Well that's partially just me
being selfish but a lack of the APA6 document class would be a complete
deal-breaker for anyone wanting to use LyX. Oh, and while poking along I ran
over a note that the Manual was being translated into Arabic, Simple Chinese,
Italian, Nepalese, Polish, Romanian, Portuguese, and Spanish among other
languages.
>
I agree, APA use is widespread,and it probably will not slowing down any time
soon. I think it will be best if we just try to learn to cope with it.
>1. The answer was no, Zotero does not do this but there is a reasonable work
>around: Just type the Author part and insert the reference with author
suppressed.
Jacob
