Improve APA Narrative In-Text Citation Formatting ("and" instead of "&")

[gwbrck]

Description

In academic writing that follows APA style, narrative in-text citations require the use of "and" instead of "&" between authors (when there are exactly two authors). While the current CSL implementation can distinguish between parenthetical and narrative citations, it does not support the specific formatting rule that mandates '&' in parenthetical citations and 'and' in narrative citations.

Problem Details

According to the APA Style guidelines (source), the expected formatting is as follows:

Author type	Parenthetical citation	Narrative citation
One author	(Luna, 2020)	Luna (2020)
Two authors	(Salas & D'Agostino, 2020)	Salas and D'Agostino (2020)
Three or more authors	(Martin et al., 2020)	Martin et al. (2020)

This distinction is currently unsupported by CSL and is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. As noted in this comment:

"[...] reference managers may just pull citations out of the parentheses and add a replacement rule for APA and APA-based styles. I know that's what Bookends (not using CSL) does already, and I think that's what Zotero is considering."

Potential Solutions

As previously discussed in issue #3748, a possible solution could involve the use of Pandoc filters. For instance, the apaquarto extension demonstrates a great approach for Quarto users. However, this solution is format-specific and lacks the flexibility of a filter-based implementation that could work across multiple formats.

The current implementation in apaquarto (see source code) modifies citations after citeproc processing. This requires support for applying filters after citeproc has run. A potential enhancement, such as the one proposed in #7888, could enable such a solution.

Desired Outcomes

• A Lua filter extension that applies the correct formatting for narrative citations across various formats.
• Alternatively, native support for APA narrative citations within citeproc.

Discussion

While an out-of-the-box experience for APA-style citations (without relying on biblatex) in Quarto would be the ideal goal, it may not be feasible for Quarto to implement this in a workaround-heavy manner. Additionally, CSL appears to be planning a 2.0 release to address this and other issues, but the timeline seems uncertain to me (see discussion).

Until then, a filter extension would be a practical interim solution. I am willing to maintain such a filter but currently lack the technical knowledge to apply a Lua filter after citeproc has processed the citations.

Request for Feedback

• Would this argument support the implementation of Pandoc/Lua stack: call citeproc from our Lua stack #7888?
• Are there alternative, simpler ways to implement a filter extension for this problem?

Any guidance or suggestions on tackling this issue would be greatly appreciated. A quick solution would significantly improve APA compliance in academic writing workflows.

Thank you for your insights!

[gwbrck]

Okay, I figured out how to turn the apaquarto format extension wjschne/apaquarto into a small filter extension. Here's my approach: gwbrck/apa_and_amp.

I still find it inconvenient that users of this extension need to set citeproc: false so that I can run citeproc as a Lua filter script. I'm concerned that this might not be very robust since I don't fully understand all its implications. If anyone knows of a more reliable way, I'd be very interested. It would be practical if I could specify within the filter extension itself that my filter should run directly after citeproc and before any others. Or is that maybe not necessary at all?

I'd appreciate any help. Thanks a lot!