LyX ⇒ Referencing APA 6th (Harvard) Style

[CrocoDuck]

Hi!

So, soon I will have to write assignments for my master course and I am asked to reference the material according to the APA 6th (Harvard) Style. I have been able to find the template APA6 and apacite as referencing style is very close to what the University pretends I do... but not the same exact thing. There are actually minor differences here and there, such us the title of websites written in italics instead of normal and so. I was wondering if some of you is able to explain to me:

How to get a referencing style fully compliant with APA 6th with Lyx, or

How, if possible, I can slightly modify the style to fit my needs.

Here a guide that explain in details how I am supposed to reference: http://www.salford.ac.uk/__data/assets/ ... ndbook.pdf

[CrocoDuck]

Well... this kind of silence usually happens when someone makes a dumb question that should be easily solved by a good search online. My apologies for that...

I have been playing around with apa, apacite, apacitex and .bib files for a while. I think that my reference style is almost perfect now.

I have just set American Psychological Association (APA), v.6 as Document Class in Document Settings, with doc as a Custom Class option. I have loaded the modules Natbibapa, Theorems (AMS), Number Equations by Section and Number Figures by Section. Bibliography is set to Natbib with Author-year style. Finally, here the content of my preamble:

\usepackage{url}

While my BibTex Generated Bibliography has apacite as Style.

That produces very very close results to the ones of the guide I linked. Honestly, only two things seems different to me (still have to double check):

One: The font of the urls in the bibliography is different from the rest of the text. I'd like to avoid it (for example, how reference of articles appears is just perfect, font of the websites apart).

Two: To make the references of website as close as possible I used this code in my .bib file:

@article{NCE,
author = {{National Council for Energy}},
title = {{Temperature analysis summary}},
year = "2010",
howpublished={{Retrieved 14 April, 2012, from \url{www.nce.org.uk/summaries/347}}}
}

The fact is that everything must have the same font. Other classes render the title in italics and I must avoid it. Here I have two problems. One is simple: the url will be displayed in a different font (easy to correct removing \url). But at the end of the citation I will have a full stop. I must not have it.

So, at the end of the day, I must solve just two problems:

Make the font with which the websites are displayed the same as the rest. For example:

Rosenzweig, M. L., & Winakur, J. (1969). Population ecology of desert rodent communities: habitats and environmental complexity. Ecology, 50(4), 558-572. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/

Remove the dot at the end of the website citation. For example:

United States Geological Survey. (2006). National elevation dataset. Retrieved 15 August, 2010, from http://ned.usgs.gov/

Any ideas? So sorry for my dumb questions, but I really don't want to lose marks because bad citations (or worse, to be forced to used word).

[Johannes_B]

Hi and welcome, there are no dumb questions

Personally, i don't use LyX, so i can't be of much help there.
On the other hand, i have read so many questions saying »I have to use APA, but this and this need to be different!« That is something which seems to be a logical error to my understanding.
There are different packages out there implementing the document style (headers, footers, margin ...) and the bibliography/cite style. As you may notice, i am confused by the APA (maybe that's their goal :-p )

Current standard in bibliographies is biblatex in conjunction with the bibliography processor biber. APA support is given by biblatex-apa.

You described what you want with words. It is hard to translate those words back to tex. You can create a minimal LyX example or a minimal LaTeX example to show what you got so far. This makes testing easier.

Concerning the font of the urls, you can do \urlstyle{same} in your document preamble.

btw: nice picture.

[CrocoDuck]

Hi! Thank you so much for your reply! So sorry for my late reply. Well, I am on my way to produce a minimal Lyx example. I will upload it somewhere tonight or tomorrow. Unfortunately, \urlstyle{same} didn't help, but the reason will be clear after I upload the minimal example I guess.

Regarding the packages, I am on Arch Linux and I installed TexLive from repos. I -think- that I should have somehow biblatex-apa. Here the content of texlive-bibtexextra: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extr ... tra/files/ . From the Arch Wiki:

To determine which CTAN packages are included in each package, lookup the files:

Code: Select all

 /var/lib/texmf/arch/installedpkgs/<package>_<revnr>.pkgs

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Te ... xlive-most

This is the content of /var/lib/texmf/arch/installedpkgs :

Code: Select all

texlive-bibtexextra_34822.pkgs   texlive-latexextra.maps
texlive-core.maps                texlive-latexextra_34865.pkgs
texlive-core_34872.pkgs          texlive-music.maps
texlive-fontsextra.maps          texlive-music_33826.pkgs
texlive-fontsextra_34817.pkgs    texlive-pictures.maps
texlive-formatsextra_33826.pkgs  texlive-pictures_34851.pkgs
texlive-games.maps               texlive-plainextra_34228.pkgs
texlive-games_34491.pkgs         texlive-pstricks_34856.pkgs
texlive-genericextra_34393.pkgs  texlive-publishers_34878.pkgs
texlive-htmlxml_34624.pkgs       texlive-science.maps
texlive-humanities_34877.pkgs    texlive-science_34853.pkgs

btw: nice picture.

Uh! Thanks!

[CrocoDuck]

Alright, here my minimal example. It is just a bibliography containing websites, the part I have more troubles with. The rest seems ok to me, but still have to triple check. My .bib file contains just examples I found online and the code that make me able to get as close as possible to the examples in the guide I linked. I have included the part of the guide with website examples in the .zip file, so you can easily compare it with my result (the full guide is included as well). You can spot the differences between my result and the examples in the guide: website font and/or full stop at the end.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t5n45wz86715f ... e.zip?dl=0

[CrocoDuck]

Some improvement I think. Thanks to this page now I have written a bibtex website template that seems able to adhere to the standard:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... a-web-page

@online{ref,
author = {Name1 Surname1 and Name2 Surname2},
title = {{Title if Website}},
HowPublished = {{Title if Page}},
month = {dd Month},
year = {yyyy},
url={www.theurl.int},
urldate = {on ddth Month, yyyy}
}

I am gonna check everything again now. If successful I will have just one problem: make \urlstyle{same} to work.

[CrocoDuck]

WOW. Guys, I think I got the solution for the url font. According to this page:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... th-apacite

I edited my preamble to this:

\usepackage{url}
\AtBeginDocument{\urlstyle{APACsame}}

Looks like it is working! So, in the following days I will check every single little thing, so that I can be dead sure that I can reference as I am supposed to. If successful I will mark the thread as solved. If you want to test my minimal example do it, maybe you will have some good advice for me! Thank you for your help!