phdthesis not rendering correctly

[wjakethompson]

I render PDFs through R Markdown, so apologies in advance if I'm missing some subtleties that would solve this problem more directly. I'm trying to reference a dissertation, but am unable to replicate the reference style in APA7. In the example below from the APA manual, the normal fields do not populate the reference correctly (i.e., "Doctoral dissertation" in with publication number instead of school; school not in brackets). I'm able to work around this by changing the type to Publication and moving the school to the titleaddon field in the bibtex file.

I originally asked the question on Tex stackexchange, and it was suggested that this may be a bug that should be reported here.

bibtex file (phd.bib):

@phdthesis{example,
  author = {Hollander, M. M.},
  year = {2017},
  title = {Resistance to authority: Methodological innovations and new lessons from the {Milgram} experiment},
  number = {10289373},
  school = {University of Wisconsin-Madison},
  publisher = {{ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global}}
}

@phdthesis{example2,
  author = {Hollander, M. M.},
  year = {2017},
  title = {Resistance to authority: Methodological innovations and new lessons from the {Milgram} experiment},
  type = {Publication},
  number = {10289373},
  titleaddon = {{Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison}},
  publisher = {{ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global}}
}

R Markdown:

---
output:
  bookdown::pdf_document2:
    keep_tex: true
    latex_engine: "xelatex"
    citation_package: "biblatex"
bibliography: ["bib/phd.bib"]
biblio-style: apa
biblatexoptions:
  - sortcites
csl: csl/apa.csl
toc: false
---

Here is the first example: @example.

Here is the second example: @example2.

# References

Output:

[moewew]

biblatex-apa-test-references.bib actually contains an entry that does pretty much what your example2 does

https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/blob/a0f1c3cd77f38bb9e06865fe8620f9fca6c7e49d/bibtex/bib/biblatex-apa-test-references.bib#L1560-L1593

But I think that biblatex-apa should ideally support the same input as the standard styles for theses.

I have something that almost works. The only thing I'm struggling with is what to do with the "Publication No." obviously the number itself should go into number. Currently the "Publication" bit goes into type, but classically that is where "Doctoral Dissertation" etc. lives, so that won't work. (Intuitively I wanted to take series, because series+number often go together, but that just isn't right.)

[ntrocado]

I think that the test examples are not ideal... Using titleaddon doesn't allow for localization-agnostic bib files.

According to the biblatex docs, the type field should be used with one of the following keys: bathesis, mathesis, phdthesis, candthesis. The exact string would be defined somewhere else, according to language settings. The institution field should also be used, and not moved into titleaddon, further overloading it, like in examples 10.6:65 and 10.6:66.

number and series are not available fields under thesis. Maybe information like publication numbers should properly go into titleaddon?

In any case, this needs an update to conform with APA7.

[plk]

I suspect we can close this as the APA 7th edition version of the style is now release?

[ntrocado]

I might be wrong, but I still think this still needs updating to use the type and institution fields, instead of relying on titleaddon with explicit expressions such as "doctoral dissertation", as per p. 13 ("thesis") of the biblatex documentation - see my comment above.

[plk]

@moewew - a bit belated but you mention above that you has some idea about this? I agree that a more standard use of fields would be preferable here which would presumably mean a few more localisation strings in the APA style.

[moewew]

Mhh, I don't remember everything. Here is how far I got when I looked at this https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/compare/master...moewew:rebthes.

[plk]

Should be better now. thesis entries are using the standard phdthesis and mastersthesis auto-mapped variants and the use of TITLEADDON is removed with TYPE, NUMBER and INSTITUTION being used instead.

[ntrocado]

Much better, thank you! The only thing is that I'm getting "(Doctoral dissertation)", between parenthesis, when I think it should use square brackets (see section 10.6 of the APA7 manual).

[plk]

Can you give an example of this? It should be be square brackets, as you say and the reference regression docs do have the square brackets.