Numbered In-text Citations With APA Style bibliography

Question

I am trying to create a bibliography that uses the APA style, but with numbered in-text citations (e.g. [#] ). At present, my in-text citations are in the more traditional form of (author, year). I have included a MWE of this below.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{report}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[a4paper,top=2.5cm,bottom=3cm,left=3cm,right=3cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{apacite}  
\usepackage{amsmath}
\begin{document}
Example \cite{kearon1998noninvasive}.
\interlinepenalty=10000
\bibliography{References.bib}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\end{document}

The example References.bib is given by

@article{kearon1998noninvasive,
  title={Noninvasive diagnosis of deep venous thrombosis},
  author={Kearon, Clive and Julian, Jim A and Math, M and Newman, Toni E and Ginsberg, Jeffrey S},
  journal={Annals of internal medicine},
  volume={128},
  number={8},
  pages={663--677},
  year={1998},
  publisher={American College of Physicians}
}

I have read through the apacite package manual and am unsure of how this can be achieved. Is it even possible?

Answer 1

This is quite easy to do with biblatex. I would not use the actual apa style, however, since it is not designed to be used like this. Instead use the more generic author-year style. Here I've used the ext-authoryear style which allows for some simple adjustments from the default author-year style. This implements option B in my comment on your question, where the numbering reflects the alphabetical order of the references not the citation order, which I think is the most sensible combination for this sort of bibliography.

Robust solution

As moewe notes in the comments, my original quick and dirty solution really fakes the numbering of the bibliography lines with respect to the references in the text, since there is no actual connection to them. Although this will work for many cases, it's not fully robust, so the proper way to do this is to use the actual formatting provided from the numeric.bbx code in biblatex. So this is the proper way to do things:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[citestyle=numeric,bibstyle=ext-authoryear,articlein=false]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\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}
\DeclareFieldFormat[article]{pages}{#1}%
\DeclareFieldFormat{labelnumberwidth}{\mkbibbrackets{#1}}
\begin{document}
\cite{yoon,aksin}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Quick and dirty solution

For a quick and dirty solution which will work for many cases, you can use the technique outlined in this question for the numbering of the bibliography.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[citestyle=numeric,bibstyle=ext-authoryear,articlein=false]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\defbibenvironment{bibliography}
{\enumerate[label={[\arabic*]}]}
{\endenumerate}
{\item}
\DeclareFieldFormat[article]{pages}{#1}%
\begin{document}
\cite{yoon,aksin}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Answer 2

Back in the days of yore (I mean: before biblatex) you had to concoct your own bst (bibliography style) file in pure BAFLL (BibTeX's Anonymous Forth Like Language) to process your bibliography with BibTeX, which was a pain, because... well, it was a FLL.

Fortunately, there is a nice little package called custom-bib which includes a nice little TeX program makebst to produce TeX batch files (dbj) to generate custom bst files trying to fulfill your expectations.

So, basically, you run

tex makebst

in your terminal, and the program leads you through an interactive interface, where you may select the options required to produce your style. At the end of the process, the program generates a dbj file, which is yet another TeX file you may run to produce the final bst file with your bibliographic style. This way, if you change your mind (of find out you fouled up), you may edit the dbj file, comment in/out the options of your choice, and produce yet another bst by running

tex yourstyle.dbj

You may still hack/kludge the final bst file a bit; but again, programming in pure BAFLL may be EXTREMELY PAINFUL if you are not used to it. makebst does a nice little job to jumpstart your task, and tweaking the byproducts is relatively easy.

Given the system's limits for answers, and following Alan Munn's advice in the comments, I am posting here a link to a first attempt to suit your needs: the batch file and generated bibliography style are posted on GitHub.

https://gist.github.com/jarnosz/931d6eb5ae1eef2c58407f8d3f9ec5ff

The bibliography style tries to implement what you ask for.

 %-------------------------------------------------------------------
 % This bibliography style file is intended for texts in ENGLISH
 % This is a numerical citation style, and as such is standard LaTeX.
 % It requires no extra package to interface to the main text.
 % The form of the \bibitem entries is
 %   \bibitem{key}...
 % Usage of \cite is as follows:
 %   \cite{key} ==>>          [#]
 %   \cite[chap. 2]{key} ==>> [#, chap. 2]
 % where # is a number determined by the ordering in the reference list.
 % The order in the reference list is alphabetical by authors.
 %---------------------------------------------------------------------

Just remember to declare your \bibliographystyle{plainad}: as the comment says, neither apacite.sty nor any other macro interface is required; so this bibstyle may work even in Plain TeX.

Here are the results: