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:
- My document structured and formatted in APA 6th style (provided by
apa6
). - Citations and reference list in APA 6th style (provided
biblatex-apa
). - Allow for chapters (missing from
apa6
). - 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:
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
andmemoir
orKOMA-Script
. I went withmemoir
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
withbiber
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.