Using APA7 with umalayathesis

Currently the umalayathesis class uses apacite to implement the bibliography style, but apacite supports only APA6. For full APA7 it would be necessary to use biblatex-apa; no BibTeX style for full APA7 exists yet.

I’m still hoping (against hope?) that one day, the apacite package will be updated to support APA7, so that umalayathesis.cls won’t need to undergo overhauling…

But for now, if you want to use full APA7, it may actually be easier to make the following changes within thesis.tex itself.

Add these lines before \documentclass:

\RequirePackage{scrlfile}
\PreventPackageFromLoading{multibib}
\providecommand{\newcites}[2]{}

Make sure to add the custombib option in the \documentclass declaration:

\documentclass[english,singlespacedlisttitles,custombib]{umalayathesis}

And then add these lines after \documentclass:

\usepackage[natbib,style=apa]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{myrefs.bib}
\setlength\bibitemsep{2\onelineskip}
\setlength\bibhang{0.5in}
\renewcommand{\bibfont}{\SingleSpacing}

Next remove or comment out these lines:

\bibliography{myrefs}
\nociteown{Lim:2009,Bond:etal:WordNetBahasa:2014}
\bibliographyown{myrefs}

Add instead:

\cftinserthook{toc}{PlainChapTocLines}
\cftinserthook{toc}{disableuppercase}
\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc,title=\refname]
 
\begin{refsection}
\nocite{Lim:2009,Bond:etal:WordNetBahasa:2014}
\printbibliography[heading=bibintoc,title=\listpubname]
\end{refsection}

If you are using the splitpubs environment to separate your publication list for journal articles and conference proceedings, then change your splitpubs in your .tex file to be:

\begin{splitpubs}
\begin{refsection}
\nocite{Bond:etal:WordNetBahasa:2014}
\printbibliography[heading=subbibintoc,title={List of Publications:}]
\end{refsection}
 
\begin{refsection}
\nocite{Lim:2009}
\printbibliography[heading=subbibintoc,title={Papers Presented:}]
\end{refsection}
\end{splitpubs}

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.)

UMalayaThesis updated to v1.2 for Guidelines (2015)

Sigh, so I finally realised and managed to find the 2015 version of the UM thesis guidelines!!!

So I’ve updated the .cls and .tex (changes to existing v1.1.2), which includes the following updates:

  • Added a \faculty field
  • \makecoverandtitlepage now takes an option to output the
    relevant statement on the title page
  • Chapter headings are now single line, with less spacing after
    the chapter title.
  • Bibliography entries are now explicitly 0.5 inch indented and
    with really wide double spacing between entries.
  • Re-ordered elements in thesis.tex to match the updated guide.

You can download umalaythesis v1.2 from here, or from Bitbucket and Github, or open it as a an online project on Overleaf.

Updates for mmuthesis and umalayathesis

Just a quick note that updated classes of mmuthesis and umalayathesis has been uploaded at my website.

mmuthesis

Based on feedback from a MMU student who submitted her thesis recently, IPS now requires that the Publications List be categorised in to Journal Articles and Conference Proceedings, and that text in the appendices should be 10pt. Please read the updated user manual on how to prepare the Publication List under the new scheme.

umalayathesis

Bug fixes of some spacing of appendices entries in the ToC, as well as adjusting the overall line spacing to conform with the expected output by IPS. Font of the cover page now uses Arial Narrow look-alike.

University of Malaya Thesis Class

I have developed a LaTeX class and template for writing an UM (University of Malaya) thesis, complying with the IGS Universiti Malaya IGS Guide to the Preparation of Research Reports, Disertations & Theses, for a friend pursuing her PhD there.

The LaTeX class and template files is available at http://liantze.penguinattack.org/latextypesetting.html#umalayathesis. Hopefully this will be helpful to UM students!