citation styles are inconsistent

mgecht · December 5, 2014

I used zotero for the first time in a paper. I set the program to APA style. The citations were inconsistent. One with all the authors, another with et al yet another with authors full first name and rest with no first name. When I tried to edit citations it didn't work. Does anyone have suggestions.

My biblio style was inconsistent too. Are there additional setting that I missed. I had to enter lots of info by hand and by doi number, did I do something wrong there?

Thanks for any ideas, help

adamsmith · December 5, 2014

Zotero's APA is tested heavily and works very well. The only known major limitation is that it's unable to distinguish between continuously paginated journals and those that are not. You also need to make sure your titles are sentence cased, Zotero doesn't automate that.

Since it's a computer program, consistency is never a problem. If two citations look different, there is something different about their data.

To tell you more, we need specific examples. With regards to the author and et-al, my best guess would be that you're unaware of APA's rather bizarre rules on that (up to 5 authors for a first citation but only 2 for subsequent citations and up to 7 authors in the bibliography)

I had to enter lots of info by hand and by doi number, did I do something wrong there?

that's obviously also a possibility. Especially for authors, Zotero is very sensitive to small differences in entry. The same author must be entered the same way.

bwiernik · December 5, 2014

Based on your description, I'm guessing you have author names entered differently across items. Be sure that names for each author are entered exactly the same (i.e. same first name, middle name/initial etc.).