Hi Petar,

With your first question, I can’t offer much advice since APA just states that you shouldn’t include the series title; it doesn’t give a format for doing so. You could perhaps add the series title in plain text (no italics) before the publisher name if you think it’s essential to include, but again, APA advises omitting it.

For the latter, if you think the form of citation that’s being automatically generated is wrong, I’d advise overriding what the generator gives you with the version you think is correct. It could be that the source was published in multiple different forms, or that the information in the generator is simply wrong; either way, the version you read was the book version, so that’s what should be cited.

Thank you for the information. I have two questions and would appreciate your input.

1) I see in the comments that APA recommends against including information about the book series in the bibliography (reference list). This is also my experience with using Zotero, where the book series information is not included in the bibliography. However, if one wanted to include this information, what format would be advisable in the 7th edition of APA?
E.g., in: Progovac, L. (2019). A Critical Introduction to Language Evolution: Current Controversies and Future Prospects (1st ed.). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03235-7
where the book series is “SpringerBriefs in Linguistics”.

2) There is a book (with ISBN) which I have in PDF format, and according to the information from the book, I would include in my bibliography as:
Palmer, M., Gildea, D., & Xue, N. (2010). Semantic Role Labeling. Morgan & Claypool. https://doi.org/10.2200/S00239ED1V01Y200912HLT006 (The DOI is also written at the beginning of the book.)
This book is part of the book series “Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies”.
However, for some reason, it has been indexed in CrossRef as a journal article and the book series has been indexed as a journal (e.g., https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1069288120). So when I enter the DOI in those automatic programs like Zotero, I get the following reference:
Palmer, M., Gildea, D., & Xue, N. (2010). Semantic role labeling. Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, 3(1), 1–103. https://doi.org/10.2200/S00239ED1V01Y200912HLT006
I am wondering how I should cite this work.

Hi Abby,

You should usually go by the most recent, as that will be the version you’re using. It’s always important to cite the version of a source that you actually used.

I am trying to write a reference for a book and when reading the year and publisher it is a bit confusing. It says it was originally published in 2007 by one publisher and then in 2008 by another. Which year and publisher company do I go by? The most recent?

Hi Maedeh,

For this you should follow the advice on citing a book chapter in the article above.

Hi Jason,

If you’ve included a reference entry for the specific chapter (as shown under “Citing a chapter from an edited book” above), then your in-text citation should match the form of the reference entry by listing the author of the chapter. You don’t need to mention the editor in the in-text citation in this case.

Hi Ain,

You can usually only cite one book at a time; APA also recommends against including information about the series in your citations. If you referred to all the books in a series, you would have to list them all separately in your reference list (unless you did so using a single-volume edition of all the books, of course).