How to do presentation schema for APA biblio refs?

Randy Gobbel (gobbel@cogsci.ucsd.edu)
Mon, 24 Feb 1997 15:24:09 -0800

I've been playing with Thot 2.0b and am very impressed so far. I would
like to try using Thot for real work. In order to do that, I need to be
able to make by bibliographic references follow APA (American Psychological
Association) style. The complete spec for APA style is complicated; here
is the syntax:

APARef :=
'(' RefSeq ')'

RefSeq :=
AuthSeq ', ' PubYrSeq {'; ' RefSeq}

AuthSeq :=
Author |
Author ' & ' Author |
Author ', ' Author ', & ' Author |
Author ' et al.'

PubYrSeq :=
Year |
Year ', ' PubYrSeq |
Year<letter> ', ' PubYrSeq

Year :=
<digit><digit><digit><digit>

digit :=
[0..9]

letter :=
[a..z]

Examples:

(Gobbel, 1995)
(Gobbel, 1995, 1996)
(Gobbel, 1995a, 1995b)
(Gobbel, 1995; Surmeier & Kitai, 1993)
(Surmeier, Kitai, & Wilson, 1992)
(Surmeier et al., 1992)

Single quotes enclose literals. I believe that this syntax is complete, at
least for my purposes, but it doesn't capture all of the constraints. If
an author has more than one publication with the same year, alphabetic tags
are added on to the end to distinguish them--note that these tags would
also appear in the bibliography at the end of the whole report. Also, the
author sequence is not necessarily the same as in the bibliography--the
bibliography should show the full author list, but references abbreviate
lists of more than three authors.

My impression is that Thot is probably powerful enough to handle this
complicated spec, but actually casting this into a schema is not an easy
task for a Thot beginner like myself. I would appreciate any suggestions
from Thot experts on how to set up this schema, and indeed if I'm right in
thinking it can be done at all.

-Randy