Two authors, same name

claville

Is there a way to disambiguate two authors who have the exact same name (e.g., Michael Lynch and Michael Lynch)? In-text citations aren't a problem, but I don't want one of the names to be "---" in the bibliography. I usually use MLA style, if that makes a difference.

aurimas

Could you include middle names?

claville

Unfortunately, neither of these guys had/used one.

adamsmith

yeah, middle names are probably the best you can do. If need be, even a fake middle name will have them sorted properly in the bibliography and you can just do a quick search&replace when you're done with the document.
Other than that this won't be solveable until ORCID is both widely spread and implemented in Zotero.

aurimas

Then I don't think it would be correct to do what you want to do. The "---" doesn't really indicate that it's the same person, it just means that it's the same name. You may be able to trick Zotero into thinking these are distinct names by figuring out how to write them differently (e.g. use a different character for one of the letters, or add some sort of Unicode combining mark). I can't think of anything off the top of my head

nickbart

Regarding a somewhat related issue, http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/latest.html, in the June 2014 Q&A, recommended the following:

Q. We are currently revising the references of a book chapter and have come across the following problem: Two sources of the same year have the identical first seven authors, and we don’t know how to differentiate them in the text (authors, year). In this case a and b are not applicable, because starting with the eighth author, the authors are not the same. Should we list all eight names in both cases?

A. I’m afraid you’re stuck with naming all the authors:

(Grumpy, Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey, and Snow 2008)

(Grumpy, Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey, and Queen 2008)

An alternative is to annotate the reference list with something like “In text, referred to as Grumpy et al. [1] 2008.” Putting [1] after the author instead of a after the date indicates that Grumpy et al. [1] and Grumpy et al. [2] are different author groups, whereas 2008a and 2008b indicate different works of the same author group.

So maybe using Michael Lynch [1] and Michael Lynch [2] might be an option in this case.

aurimas

I'm not the expert on this, but my understanding is that a, b, etc. disambiguation has nothing to do with identifying author lists as identical, but simply guiding the reader to the correct entry in the bibliography where this would otherwise be ambiguous.

Edit: what I'm trying to say is that the person asking the question should have used a/b disambiguation.

aurimas

Being not an expert, it seems like I'm wrong on the CMoS rule (they do want you to list as many authors as possible, though that seems quite ridiculous and pointless). In any case, I don't think this really pertains to MLA.

In the MLA manual (7th edition), they don't really explicitly mention a rule for same name, different person citations, but in their text they keep saying "same name" rather than "same author" when talking about three dashes. E.g. "The three hyphens stand for exactly the same name as in the previous entry" (5.3.4). So I still don't see that there's a need to distinguish the authors.

claville

I wound up doing the same thing Nick/CMS recommended, so one author is "Lynch, Michael [2]." That seems easiest for human and machine readers.

Good point about the name vs. person distinction, though. I do think it's more in keeping with the "spirit" of the bibliography, or at least the culture around it in the humanities, to preserve a concept of authorship. The Lynches in question are one literary critic (deceased) and one sociologist (living).