apacite: how to get a numbered list of references?

Question

I have a problem with the list of references. I couldn't find the answer anywhere. I am using apacite with the option natbibapa and BibTeX (.bib file). My university requires the references to be numbered like:

1. ref1
2. ref2
3. ref3

However, I still want the citing in the text to be authoryear:

Doe (2020) argues...

Any idea how to get there? Please note that I would prefer to stick with apacite, if possible.

(I tried various options on how to solve this issue, but none works. I also tried different options in addition to apacite, like natbib with apalike, but the style was not completely correct. I also read that apacite is the best for APA style references.)

Answer 1

apacite implements the citation and bibliography style from the 6th edition of the APA publication manual.

APA style is an author-year style and does not involve numbering entries in the bibliography as far as I know. Indeed numbered bibliographies will look out of place with an author-year citation style.

Now that you have been warned sufficiently that this is not APA compliant and a bad idea in general, let's attempt to get a numbered bibliography.

With natbibapa apacite delegates control over the bibliography environment (thebibliography) to natbib, so we have to fiddle with natbib's internal commands to make it produce a numbered bibliography.

There is one problem here: apacite's bibliography style does not calculate the longest numeric label that we need to format the list properly. Because I'm lazy I just hard-coded a value that seemed sensible below (1em, but you may need a higher value if the numbers get longer).

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}

\makeatletter
\renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{[#1]}%

\renewcommand\NAT@bibsetnum[1]{%
   \setlength{\labelwidth}{1em}%
   \setlength{\labelsep}{2\labelsep}%
   \setlength{\leftmargin}{\labelwidth}
   \addtolength{\leftmargin}{\labelsep}%
   \setlength{\itemsep}{\bibsep}\setlength{\parsep}{\z@}%
   \ifNAT@openbib
     \addtolength{\leftmargin}{\bibindent}%
     \setlength{\itemindent}{-\bibindent}%
     \setlength{\listparindent}{\itemindent}%
     \setlength{\parsep}{0pt}%
   \fi
}

\newcommand*{\numbibliography}{%
  \let\@bibsetup\NAT@bibsetnum
  \let\@biblabel\NAT@biblabelnum
  \bibliography}
\makeatother


\begin{document}
\citet{apa6:ch7-ex38}

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\numbibliography{apa5ex}
\end{document}

---

It should be noted that the current edition of the APA publication manual is the 7th edition. The only 7th-edition APA style implementation I know of is biblatex-apa.

With biblatex-apa you could use the following definitions to get a numbered bibliography (see Using bibstyle=numeric but displaying autho, year without brackets in the bibliography)

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=apa, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\defbibenvironment{bibliography}
  {\setlength{\leftmargin}{\bibhang}%
   \setlength{\itemindent}{-\leftmargin}%
   \setlength{\labelsep}{\biblabelsep}%
   \setlength{\itemsep}{\bibitemsep}%
   \setlength{\parsep}{\bibparsep}%
   \begin{enumerate}}
  {\end{enumerate}}
  {\item}

\begin{document}
\autocite{sigfridsson}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Note that with this setting there is no way to access these label numbers later. If you wanted that, you'd need to activate the option labelnumber and

\DeclareFieldFormat{labelnumberwidth}{\mkbibbrackets{#1}}
\DeclareFieldFormat{shorthandwidth}{\mkbibbrackets{#1}}
\defbibenvironment{bibliography}
  {\list
     {\printtext[labelnumberwidth]{%
        \printfield{labelprefix}%
        \printfield{labelnumber}}}
     {\setlength{\labelwidth}{\labelnumberwidth}%
      \setlength{\leftmargin}{\labelwidth}%
      \setlength{\labelsep}{\biblabelsep}%
      \addtolength{\leftmargin}{\labelsep}%
      \setlength{\itemsep}{\bibitemsep}%
      \setlength{\parsep}{\bibparsep}}%
      \renewcommand*{\makelabel}[1]{\hss##1}}
  {\endlist}
  {\item}