How to cite secondary sources in APA style?

Questions
1

Hello everyone,

for my thesis I need to cite a few sources I don’t have the original for; thus, I can just cite the secondary source I actually read. APA suggests citing secondary sources in text like this:

(Rabbitt, 1982, as cited in Lyon et al., 2014)

The primary source is not part of my bibliography file because I didn’t read it.
A combination of different citation styles

(Rabbitt, 1982; as cited in #cite(<Lyon_2014>, form: "author"), #cite(<Lyon_2014>, form: "year"))

works partially but fails when I cite multiple works from the same author and year when
Lyon et al., 2014a and Lyon et al., 2014b are needed.

Is there another way or a workaround for this problem?

Kind regards

1 Like
2

Hi, welcome to the forum!
(I had noticed your question quite a while ago, but I didn’t understand your problem at that time, so I didn’t reply. I didn’t expect that no one else had replied by now…)

It seems that the problem lies in the following facts.

  1. If we use regular @cites, then there will be redundant parentheses.
  2. If we use #cite(…, form: "year"), then both 2014a and 2014b become 2014.

I think circumventing 1 is more practical, that is, show "(": none.

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#let secondary(body) = {
  [as cited in ]
  show "(": none
  show ")": none
  body
}

(Rabbitt, 1982; #secondary[@Lyon_2014a @Lyon_2014b])

#bibliography(
  bytes(
    ```bib
    @article{Lyon_2014a,
      date = {2014},
      author = {Lyon and Lyon and Lyon},
      Title = {Work A},
    }
    @article{Lyon_2014b,
      date = {2014},
      author = {Lyon and Lyon and Lyon},
      Title = {Work B},
    }
    ```.text,
  ),
  style: "apa",
)
3 Likes
3

Thank you very much for your reply. Your solution is more elegant than what I came up with.

I was inspired by this post to just remove the the parentheses with a regex.

My personal solution was this one:

#let cited-in(label) = {
  show regex("\(|\)"): none
  "cited it "
  cite(label, form: "normal") 
}

Yours is better because the syntax is more in line with the default way to cite in Typst, and by this, it also allows you to put in multiple sources.

Generally speaking, it would be very nice to have a built-in way to do this, but for now this seems like the most elegant solution.

1 Like