Multiple authors with same name appearing together in bibliography

escdotdot

Hello,

I have two authors with the same name, but of course in my bibliography (Chicago style) their entries are combined under a single author name. Is there any way to force Zotero to treat them as separate authors?

Thank you!

adamsmith

No, not if they have the exact same name I'm afraid.
No middle initial or so you could use?

djross3

Do any citation styles ask for this distinction? In effect, if they have exactly the same name, then they are the same person according to the bibliography. It would even be confusing to the reader to separate them.

Of course adding a middle initial or other information would be helpful if possible, but otherwise the only thing I can think of doing would be to actually annotate that they are different people (adding a number to the names?), but that seems strange for other reasons. Maybe you could use a full first name for one and an initial for the other (especially if you get lucky with that and find one author tends to use an initial more often for publication than the other)?

escdotdot

thanks for the replies. This is a problem for names that have been romanised (Chinese names, in my case). The romanisation is not as unique as the original Chinese characters (although there might also be people with names using the same Chinese characters). I guess I could input the Chinese characters as a middle name which will then distinguish the two.

djross3

Oh, that makes sense. Yes, I would personally add the original names in brackets like [...]. (Not just as a middle name, but indicating as a translation. That usually works well in Zotero.) But I do that normally when I'm transliterating, so I admit that might not fit your goal if you only want a romanized form: in this case, though, it seems like the best option. (The only complication would then be if they each have a paper during the same year, in which case it would be confusing because the years would be disambiguated, depending on your style, but still separate in the bibliography.)