In my good ol’ teaching days, students would frequently ask me: “I am citing this book, but it has six cities—some in the United States and some abroad—associated with its publisher location, so which one do I cite, or do I cite them all?”
Hmmm.
Of course, I never had all day, or even a minute, to think about how to address this conundrum (people want a microwave answer to their queries: quick). So, I would always tell my students to pick the first city listed. My rationale was that the most prominent location/número uno/“where it all started” would be ordered first, and as long as that one was listed in the reference, then everything was fine.
Then again, now that I think about it, maybe some of those cities were listed in alphabetical order…
Hmmm.
Oh, well. It’s too late for regrets now.
Thankfully, the new guidelines in the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association have absolved confused APA Style users such as myself of this geography sin.