A glitch in in-text citations?

Sakhmet

Hi.

After upgrading to Zotero 7 I am facing a problem with Zotero adding randomly first name initial in the in-text citations. I am using APA7, as most of the time, and I have never faced it in the previous version.

I have tried to test the reasons and I have the following observations: the problem occurs
- when a first name is pasted,
- when any letter/special sign is pasted (the only way to insert it; letters with accent from French etc.),
- when name or surname field has any space (for example “van den” in front of the surname),
- when the first name has an initial of the second name (perhaps a matter of the space).

There must be some other reasons too, because manual typing and removing initial not always help. Anyway, deleting the initial is wrong, so I will need to re-insert it in the end (inserting now will exclude the citation from automatical update in case of any changes).

Any ideas how to fix it?

dstillman

Nothing new here:

https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation

bwiernik

And note that it is correct APA style to include initials when you cite multiple different authors with the same last name.

Sakhmet

dstillman, thank you, but I have tried this before, and none of these helped. But thanks for the link, it may be useful in the future.

bwiernik, thanks for reminding me! It solved the issue! In some entries I had for instance just Ben, in some Ben J.L., so Zoreto treated them as of separate authors. And it was enough that in one place Élizabeth had regular E.

Thank you both for your replies.

dstillman

(I'm not sure what "none of these helped" means? The page I linked to explains that disambiguation is valid APA and tells you exactly what you have to do to fix it when you have mismatched names.)