On 5/24/2021 16:28, Nicola wrote:

   I don't know if this is restricted to inproceedings entries, but
consider the following test.bib:

    @inproceedings{Foo:1983,
      author = {Foo, Bar},
      booktitle = {Booktitle},
      pages = {34--39},
      title = {Title of the paper},
      year = {1983}
    }

When this is typeset:

    \usebtxdataset[test.bib]
    \usebtxdefinitions[apa]
    \starttext
      \cite[Foo:1983]
      \placelistofpublications
    \stoptext

the result is:

(Foo, 1983)
Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In Title of the paper., Booktitle. Author.

I would expect:

(Foo, 1983)
Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In Booktitle, p. 34–39.

or something similar.

I can reproduce it with ConTeXt from TeX Live 2021 and the current LMTX.
Is it a bug?

Nicola

This is intended. Or rather, it is a side-effect of the intended behavior.

If you add an editor ("editor={Baz, Bar}") you will get something like:

Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In B. Baz (Ed.), Booktitle. Author.

And if you then add a publisher ("publisher={Paymefirst}") you will get:

Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In B. Bar (Ed.), Booktitle. Paymefirst.

The APA presumes that you have both an editor and a publisher for pieces contained in other works. It calls for the use of the author as publisher if no publisher is present. It is silent about what to do if you have no editor.

The editor and publisher fields are described as required in mkiv-publications.pdf (page 85), however, you should be able to define your own customized btx handling (see chapter 6) to override this, removing both the editor and the publisher as requirements. Just a little coding.

(I have previously suggested that repeating the title in the case of a missing editor should not be done. The behavior has not been changed in last the two years.)

You should take careful note of the following from page 29 of that manual:

A note on the APA style: We get the strong impression that the APA bibliography style standard was made with the implicit assumption that manual intervention would be involved in the editing and production process; It has been an arduous task to create a system capable of fully conforming to these specifications.

I will add that there is still quite a bit of work to do for APA and pretty much any other published style. Manual tuning (or editorial leniency) is required to conform in all but the most basic cases.