Inconsistent inline citation format

simonho213

I'm writing a paper using APA6 format and some of my inline citations will look like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/004yja32955tnd6/ref.png?dl=0

You'll notice that most of the time authors are listed by their last name, however, in the case of Chen I'm also getting their first name initials

This only happens about 1% of the time, but its difficult to dig through my paper to find where this is happening to apply a manual fix

Is there a reason why zotero does this?

adamsmith

Assuming the names are entered correctly in Zotero (i.e. as lastname, firstname), you're almost certainly seeing this: https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/given_name_disambiguation

simonho213

So in my paper I have the following papers cited:

Chen, H.-C., Schultz, A. B., Ashton-Miller, J. A., Giordani, B., Alexander, N. B., & Guire, K. E. (1996)

Chen, K. Y., & Bassett, D. R. (2005)

And I think you're right, zotero is trying to disambiguate between 2 authors with the same last name (Chen)

This would be important if I have an inline citation like Chen at al. (xxxx), as it may be unclear which paper I'm referring to, but in the example I posted it should be clear from the second author (Bassett) that I'm not referring to the first paper, especially given the publication year

Is this typical behaviour for APA, or something I need to go in and change?

bwiernik

You are seeing the correct behavior per the APA style guide. Author initials should be added to disambiguate same-name first authors, even if the years are different. Technically, you should add the initials if you are typing the names in text for an inline citation, but personally I've never bothered with adhering to that rule in my own writing, and APA journals don't both enforcing it much.