Zotero bug when adding the same multiple authors for papers published in the same year

louiseglynn
I was having a lot of difficulty with this issue, but I've finally found a fix.

As soon as I added more than 2 papers with the same multiple authors in the same year, et al stopped working and it was adding all the authors for all the papers.

When you add the papers into Zotero Manager (add a, b, c etc.) after the year manually.

I hope this helps other people in the same situation!
  • adamsmith
    No, absolutely do not do that. Zotero adds names before et al. to disambiguate authors as styles require it: APA and Chicago do, e.g.
    Other styles (and all styles when you have the exact same authors) will automate suffixes.
    If that's not working as expected, report here with examples

    Adding them to the year in Zotero will not reliably work & break other functionality.
  • louiseglynn
    edited today at 3:19pm
    My fix works perfectly for APA 7th Edition, citing Author et al. and including the full list of authors for each paper in the reference list.

    As I said in the original post, the automating was not working...it broke when adding the third paper with the same authors in the same year. If you want to try to recreate it yourself, work away but I have to go out, so I don't have time to facilitate your request.

    Nothing has broken for me. Rather it has fixed it.

    I'm using Zotero plugin for Microsoft Word and Zotero 10.0.6 for MAC.

    I also tried using Zotero in Google Doc and I had the same problem.

    It's working reliably for me, and it hasn't broken any other functionality.
  • adamsmith
    Obviously you can use Zotero in any way you want and that works for you.
    But since you advertised this as a solution for others, they should know that it will produce incorrect APA style (APA doesn't use a,b,c after et al unless all co-authors are the same) and render Zotero items incompatible across documents
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