APA Parenthetical Referencing

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hello all.

I’ve been playing with the Scrivener demo for a few days, and I love what I see. My question concerns citations. I see that Scrivener can do and export footnotes and endnotes, and I’ve been able to get that to work. I need to know if Scrivener can somehow support APA style parenthetical referencing, like this (Name, Year). As an undergraduate public policy major, this is kind of a make-or-break feature for me. Thanks for you help.

Kyle

2

For references, citations and bibliographies and so forth, I would recommend using a dedicated program such as Endnote, Bookends or Sente in conjunction with Scrivener. Perhaps an academic user can chime in with more specific advice, though.

Thanks and all the best,
Keith

3

I’m okay with using dedicated software for citations, and I see that you can choose an app for that in the Scrivener preferences (I’ve got the trial for Bookends right now), I just need to know that when I ultimately export a long research paper to Word, parenthetical references and a bibliography will be intact. Somehow. I hope.

4

Bookends’s temporary citations are just plain text marked with curly brackets, like this:

{Clark, 1977, #20987}

So they survive export to rtf or even to plain text. So you can put the references in your work in Scrivener, then copy and paste or export the whole draft to Word, and scan the Word document as normal.

I suspect, but do not know, that this is the same for Sente.

Hope that helps.

5

It works that way with Endnote as well.

–Greg

6

I have searched, but cannot find… A simple explanation of how to get from inserting a reference from Bookends into Scrivener; and then ending up with a formatted document, references (e.g. Harvard) in the correct format in the document and a list at the back of the document.

Any suggestions?

7

  1. Link Bookends to Scrivener, either in Bookends’ Preferences, or in File>Link to…

  2. Insert the references as normal, using Command-y in Bookends. They look like this: {Knops et al., 2009, #5492}.

  3. Use ‘Compile draft’ in Scrivener to get an rtf file with your text (including references) in it.

  4. Scan that file from within Bookends: Biblio> Scan document.

That’s it.

or if you want to use Word: 4`. Open the file in Word and scan it there using the Bookends toolbar.

or with Mellel: 4``. Open the file in Mellel, use the menu command that turns text citations into proper citation objects (Edit> Bibliography> Convert Text to Citations), then scan the file using the menu command for that (Edit> Bibliography> Scan Document).