Off topic: Software or Word Macros to check that references in a article or chapter conform to APA style.

[Art Kendall]

I routinely review articles, convention submissions, book chapters for
methodological considerations. I usually leave checking the formatting
of references to others. Now I am editing a book on aggression where
only a few of the authors are English speakers so I'll have to go
through the references for formatting.

The submissions already have reference sections so I do not need the
software that is for inputting the reference text.  I am look for stand
alone software for windows, web pages,  or for macros for WordPerfect or
Word.  Since this is pro bono work I would prefer if the software were
freeware or shareware.

The way I envision the software to work is this.  I put the references
in a separate file or paste the text into a window.  Then it parses each
reference and says whether it conforms to APA style. Ideally it would
try to correct details like spacing, punctuation, etc.

Please send me links to software that does this.

Also, if you have the software and it is propriety,  I would be willing
to pay a student a small amount to bring about 20 sets of references
into conformity with APA style.

P.S. This sounds like it would be a perfect Python application.

--
Art Kendall
Social Research Consultants

[Andy W]

IMO you may want to consider another route (just try to imagine the work that would be necessary to parse and potentially correct an APA submission and all the potential variants - that is crazy). [Maybe one of the current bibliography software vendors allows you to paste in formatted references like APA and will attempt to parse them for you?]

If it is that big of a deal I would ask the authors to provide a supplementary bibliography file that conformed to one of the plain text standards currently in use (bibtex mainly, RIS for Endnote etc.) These are pretty easy to text munge and turn into correctly formatted APA (or at least approximate). I have some current SPSS code to do similar things (takes a database of citations I maintain, and exports either a bibtext file or a plain text document of long citations in APA).

You can use google scholar to both provide a bibtex entry and an APA one (although they both need to be still   checked during copy-editing, as I've seen various errors in how they are cited).

Good luck!