APA 7 Format not being consistently followed

gumwars

I'm editing a master level thesis and have run into a problem with how Zotero displays in text citations. At what appears to be random, instead of "Author's name, et al., YYYY", I'm getting all the authors and a year appended with a lower case letter, as if the author being cited has had multiple works in the same calendar year. It's worth noting that even this behavior is not consistent as some authors do display correctly while others do not. I've verified that the offending entries have each author on a separate line within Zotero, rather than all on the same row.

I've tried deleting my entire Zotero library and adding back the references in question. I've uninstalled Zotero, reinstalled the MS Word plugin, and most permutations in between, without success. The only option I have left is the cumbersome work of manually editing each citation so that it conforms to APA 7.

The behavior seems to have started recently as it has worked fine for me over the past several years.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

adamsmith

Insert a bibliography and post the bibliography entries of the items in question here and we can likely say more. It's likely a mix of duplicates and poor data entry.

I've tried deleting my entire Zotero library and adding back the references in question.

This, though, was a bad idea. It'll make it much more complicated and labor intensive to fix this, since the citations in your Word doc are now no longer connected to anything in your Zotero library -- they were connected to the since deleted items.

gumwars

Upon further examination, I've found some issues with the author's use of Zotero. I wouldn't chalk this up to poor data entry, but poor data management.

And to take it a step further, they apparently cited some of the works and then later deleted the duplicate entries, causing the problems that I'm dealing with now.

Thank you for your help in getting me to look at this from a different angle.