Add year suffix by order of citation occurrence

tina_cardona

Hi there,

I'm trying to edit a custom style based on APA to conform with a request and need some assistance. For sources with the same author and date (e.g., USEPA 2024), I want the a, b, c, etc. assigned based on the order they are cited in my document, not based on month/day or alphabetical order by title. Does that make sense?

Thanks,
Tina

bwiernik

Note that APA explicitly calls for year suffixes to be assigned based on the order in the bibliography, which is ordered by month/day (when shown) and title for items with the same year. It is a very common misunderstanding of APA rules to think that the suffixes are assigned by order of appearance, so if the request is coming from a supervisor or instructor, I strongly recommend following APA style and showing them rules 8.19 and 9.47 in the APA manual. The rules are not ambiguous about this.

If you do really need to assign suffixes in order of appearance, you would need to edit the APA CSL file.

Open the file and change the 'sort' section of the bibliography from:

<sort>
<key macro="author-sort"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group" sort="ascending"/>
<key macro="date-sort" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="status"/>
<key macro="title"/>
</sort>


to:

<sort>
<key macro="author-sort"/>
<key macro="date-sort-group" sort="ascending"/>
<key macro="year" sort="ascending"/>
<key variable="citation-number"/>
</sort>



You will also need to add somewhere in the style:

<macro name="year">
<date variable="issued" date-parts="year" form="numeric"/>
</macro>


tina_cardona

Thank you! Yes, I understand this is not the way APA directs us to disambiguate and appreciate your help.

These updates to the style fixed citations with one author (a government agency, usually), but did not work for journal articles with multiple authors. The particular group of citations I need to fix this for are two articles that render Li et al. 2022 but one is authored by A. Li and the other authored by Y. Li. However, the Y. Li publication is cited first in the report.

bwiernik

APA style only adds year suffixes for identical author groups. For authors with the same last name but different first names, it adds initials. For items with the same first author but different subsequent authors, it adds names until they are distinct.

tina_cardona

Yes, I'm starting to think that APA is not what we should base our reference style on if they want all these customizations that don't fit that framework. Thanks for your help!

tina_cardona

I tried to get our company to adopt APA as our global standard reference style because the CSL is so robust, especially compared to other styles I've tried to use. Thanks for creating such a great style! Are there any styles you know of, or that you've also authored that adhere to this type of year suffix disambiguation by order of cite? I will need to go back to the drawing board it looks like.

bwiernik

This style has the initials and additional author disambiguation removed: https://github.com/bwiernik/zotero-tools/blob/master/apa-short-authors.csl

tina_cardona

This is great! Thank you