APA and issue numbers

I was just playing with the APA style in the Zotero repo (trying to
move more of it to macros), and noticed this comment (from Simon I
think):

don’t cite issue numbers in APA style (since in almost all cases where
APA style is used, this is the correct behavior)

I think in reading [1] this is a lllttle misleading. The general rule
does include the issue number. It just says you can (though I don’t
think must) omit it if the journal volume is continuously paginated.
In other words, you can still locate the item because there is never
two page 10s witthin a volume. It’s for that reason alone that you can
omit.

But it’s not the case that all volumes are continuously paginate, and
that’s a condition we cannot test for. It seems to be better, then, to
ere on the side of too much information, than not enough.

Bruce

[1] http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/07/

I made the change in response to comments on the forums, since APA is
rarely used outside of the sciences, and nearly all scientific
journals use continuous pagination. If you feel that we should
continue to include the issue number for now, I trust your judgment.

The real solution to this problem is to implement #469 (add a
continuous pagination checkbox) in Zotero and add some kind of
conditional to CSL to test for it, but that’s a little ways off.

Simon

Even in continuously paginated journals having the issue number is
very helpful if one is finding hardcopy articles (where the issue
numbers are much more likely to be on the bound journal spines than
the page range).

I use APA all the time and try always to include the issue number
(especially as one might not be able to check whether the journal is
continuously paginated when preparing one’s references.)

–J