[Tex/LaTex] Is it sensible to use the apa6 class for a thesis (with chapters)

apa6memoirthesis

I want to use LaTeX/XeLaTeX (I'm a newbie) for my psychology PhD thesis, and my trial document currently uses apa6 for the document layout (and biblatex-apa/biber for referencing). It seems that apa6 does not allow for \chapter{}, and while there are two related posts on this (1, 2), I can't actually tell if it is sensible or not to use apa6 for a thesis in the first place! What I would like to be able to have is:

  1. My document structured and formatted in APA 6th style (provided by apa6).
  2. Citations and reference list in APA 6th style (provided biblatex-apa).
  3. Allow for chapters (missing from apa6).
  4. Introduce some customised styling (e.g. for quoting chunks of transcribed interviews).

Is there a relatively pain-free way to achieve goals 1 to 4? I have also considered that it might be easier to use something like memoir in combination with biblatex-apa, and give up on strict adherence to APA style (i.e. everything from apa6).

Best Answer

The comments to the question were very useful, and this advice from cfr was good:

I would not recommend using any class designed to typeset single articles for managing a thesis. You will need to change far too much. It is not just adding \chapter{} commands, things like the ToC, bibliography etc. will all be wrong. Better to figure out which few things apa6 does which you actually want and are applicable to a thesis.

Also StrongBad pointed out that the APA doesn't even have full formatting guidelines for a dissertation, so to my mind the best way to proceed is by using biblatex-apa and memoir or KOMA-Script. I went with memoir simply because the English documentation is more thorough.

From there I will configure the few necessary APA formatting things (line spacing, margins) and let biblatex-apa handle the bibliography. biblatex-apa with biber appears to provide the best APA referencing possibilities (if you want 6th style), as it allows for UTF-8 and has extra fields which make APA referencing much more pleasant for rare reference types.

Blockquotes look fine for quoting transcribed interview chunks.

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