Hello, everyone,
I’m working with a faculty member who wants all of her textbook’s citations in Pressbooks to be properly APA formatted, and she’s not happy with them having to be footnotes (we are doing this now because they will be easier to link to and navigate between them if she decides to do endnotes in the print version). How have you approached APA citations in Pressbooks? Do you hand-write each in-text citation and a list of references at the end of a chapter? I’d love to hear some options so I can report back good news!
-Abbey Elder
2 Likes
Hi Abbey–great question. Citations are tricky and I don’t know that anyone has a really satisfactory work flow for them in Pressbooks yet. I’ve long been interested in a closer integration with Zotero (see Using Zotpress? + https://github.com/pressbooks/ideas/issues/212) and think that we may have something testable to explore next year. You may want to move this question to the EDU forum as well for more visibility in case there others there who have tried different solutions?
1 Like
Abbey,
I would think typing them right on in is the way to go. Maybe copy and paste would work at the end of the chapter – that’s how we have to include citations and references for journal submissions, isn’t it? I think my TechTrends submission requirements said specifically not to use citation software.
Glad you asked this question! Will watch to see if an easier answer is shared . . .
Thank you, Kathy and Steel!
I don’t really want a citation management software like Zotero (though those are certainly helpful).
I actually think this is more of a feature request now. What would be nice is if we had a version of the [footnote][/footnote] tool that allowed you to do an Author-date citation instead of a superscript number, like APA and sometimes Chicago style recommend.
Something like [footnote="(Elder, 2019)"] Elder, A. (2019). Citation citation. Citation. DOI.[/footnote]
It would still work exactly the same in every other way, and allow the functionality to skip down to a citation at the bottom of a page like a link (one of my favorite functionalities of the footnote tool), but you can customize the text that is used as a link rather than auto-numbering.
I hope that makes sense!
-Abbey Elder
2 Likes
To be clear, I know anchors can do something like this already, but I like the functionality of being able to move all footnotes to the end of a chapter as endnotes in PDFs, and being able to do that with correct author-date citations would soothe my editorial soul.
2 Likes
Interesting idea, Abbey. I imagine that we could implement a footnote variant that did something like you described – though my question would be whether citations created in this way should be intermingled with what I’ll call ‘superscript footnotes’ or should be kept separate. I suspect that they ought to be kept separate, in a ‘references’ section, but I’m not very current on what APA recommends. Suppose you have a situation where an author includes both in-text citations and ‘superscript footnotes’ in a single work – how should those be handled? My inclination would be to handle citations and footnotes differently – to always present citations at the end of a chapter/section and to organize them alphabetically and to present footnotes/endnotes with auto-numbering and to not intersperse the two. For that reason, I’d probably advocate for creating citations outside the ‘footnote’ patterns/shortcode routine. We have two GitHub ideas that touch on similar concepts that might get closer to what you’re envisioning: https://github.com/pressbooks/ideas/issues/118 + https://github.com/pressbooks/ideas/issues/223. If either of those feel similar, please feel free to add your suggestions/refinements/ideas there?
Thank you, Steel!
That’s a great point. I had forgotten about commentary footnotes (I’m uncertain how, half of my undergraduate thesis was written in footnotes), but I agree, having citations as a separate, but similar function would be useful. I’ll look through the GitHub projects you linked and hopefully get some more inspiration.
-Abbey
1 Like