Using APA7 with usmthesis

Following up from the previous post Using APA7 with umalayathesis, but about usmsthesis. Likewise, I am hoping (against hope?) that one day, apacite package will be updated to support APA7, so that usmthesis.cls won’t need to undergo overhauling either.

But until that day comes, if you need to use APA7 with usmthesis now, then it may actually be easier to make the following changes within usmthesis.tex itself (don’t modify usmthesis.cls).

Add these lines before \documentclass.

\RequirePackage{scrlfile}
\PreventPackageFromLoading{apacite,multibib}
\AfterClass{book}{
  \RequirePackage[style=apa,natbib]{biblatex}
  \let\bibsep\bibitemsep
  \addbibresource{mybib.bib}
}

Remove these lines from usmthesis.tex: (They may be far away from each other; look carefully for each line in your .tex)

\newcites{own}{List of Publications}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliographystyleown{apacite}
\bibliography{mybib}

Where you had \bibliography{mybib}, write instead:

\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc]

If you have lists of your own publications, remove these lines too:

\nociteown{lim:2007,lim:latextypesetting}
\bibliographyown{mybib}

and write instead:

\begin{refsection}
\nocite{lim:2007,lim:latextypesetting}
\printbibliography[title={List of Publications},heading=bibintoc]
\end{refsection}

After making these changes, delete the previously generated .bbl files (if any) in the directory.

Then run pdflatex, biber, pdflatex, pdflatex. Note that the biber processor must be used instead of bibtex now.

(If compiling on Overleaf, it should all “just work” because the build tool knows which processor to use.)