On Mon, 24 May 2021 17:53:49 -0400
Rik Kabel <ConTeXt@rik.users.panix.com> wrote:

This is intended. Or rather, it is a side-effect of the intended
behavior.

If you add an editor ("editor={Baz, Bar}") you will get something
like:

    Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In B. Baz (Ed.), /Booktitle/.
    Author.

And if you then add a publisher ("publisher={Paymefirst}") you will
get:

    Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In B. Bar (Ed.), Booktitle.
    Paymefirst.

The APA presumes that you have both an editor and a publisher for
pieces contained in other works. It calls for the use of the author
as publisher if no publisher is present. It is silent about what to
do if you have no editor.

It looks like a missing editor field should be caught. What should the
rule be?

Actually, @inproceedings should not be used without an editor - makes
no sense. If the author of the paper happens to be the editor, then the
.bib data file should define this with an editor= field.

We can change the behavior if a clear case can be made as to what
fallback would make sense. Keep in mind the dictum: "garbage in/garbage
out"...

Alan

For the case of works within works (inproceedings, inbook, incollection, perhaps conference) I would think that the simplest solution is to simply drop it, so that in the example above one would simply get:

Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In Booktitle. Paymefirst.

Although I do think that, at least for inproceedings, lack of an editor should at least be flagged. A simple compilation of works may have no named editor, of I see no reason to require it for inbook or incollection. Cheap publishers regularly put out such collections of out-of-copyright works.

The implicit assumption that a work with no documented publisher is a self-published work is not especially to my liking -- publishers may have good reason to not identify themselves (think of the publishers of the works of Spinoza and, in part, Voltaire) -- but I understand that the APA thinks it important. Of course, if you cannot document the publisher for an entry, you can explicitly list it as unknown or sine nomine, as appropriate, to avoid the infelicity of having the author's name just stuck in there.

--
Rik