[Tex/LaTex] Too much space between author and year in apacite citations

apa-stylecitingspacing

Does anyone else feel that there's too much whitespace between author and year in the following example (note the red brackets)? Or is it proper standard and just annoys me because I'm not used to it?

citation with too much spacing

If you agree; how would I go about removing it, considering the following minmal working example? 

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{sample}
\begin{document}
    \noindent \citep{bundesen2005,logan1996,logan2001,logan2002}.
\end{document}

sample.bib

Best Answer

This is a bug in apacite that should be reported to its maintainer(s).

apacite defines several punctuation macros like \BBAY for the punctuation between authors and year in a citation. For example, \BBAY is ,, a comma and a space. With the natbibapa option the natbib package is used, and there the punctuation is set set with \bibpunct (among other methods). However, \bibpunct only wants the actual punctuation character, in this case the comma, and sets spaces by itself. So it is apacite's bug to feed \BBAY and the like to \bibpunct.

This can be repaired easily:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
\AtBeginDocument{%
\renewcommand{\BBAY}{,}%% punctuation between authors and year
\renewcommand{\BBC}{;}%% punctuation between multiple cites
\renewcommand{\BBYY}{,}%% punctuation between multiple years
}

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{sample}
\begin{document}
    \noindent \citep{bundesen2005,logan1996,logan2001,logan2002}.
\end{document}

Note that apacite has more spacing issues in the reference list, but glancing at the bibliography style they seem to be intended. Also, using the ampersand in the authors list (preceded by a comma no less!) seems odd, too.

sample output

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