Two articles by same author in the same year - cannot get Zotero to show chronological

nick riches · 2025-07-19T15:39:43+00:00

Hi. I am using the APA style, and my language settings are set to English UK. I am trying to cite two articles by the same author in the same year. According to the APA style, these should be "Smith (2020a)" and "Smith (2020b)". The letters a, b... are based on publication date. I have tweaked the publication dates in Zotero to ensure that the sequence is correct, but these are not showing correctly when cited, i.e. the later paper is shown as "Smith (2020a)". I have tried using ISO formatting (YYYY-MM-DD), and also MM/YYYY. What am I doing wrong?

bwiernik · 2025-07-19T21:27:58+00:00

You’re mistaken. Per the APA manual, the letter suffixes are by order of appearance in the bibliography, which is by title for two items with the same author list and displayed date (which for journal articles is just the year). (Page 305 in the manual)

nick riches · 2025-07-21T07:16:30+00:00

Oh.... My bad!! Thanks for this. I clearly need to brush up on the APA!