disambiguation in APA 7 style

MBene

Using American Psychological Association edition 7, it seems that author names are currently disambiguated with initials even when citations refer to different years and involve different coauthors. See below. Shouldn't this only apply when citations would be indistinguishable otherwise? I also checked that given names are entered correctly.

(K. A. Smith et al., 2013) ... (S. M. Smith & Blankenship, 1991)

bwiernik

That is correct APA style. When two different first authors have the same surname, initials are added to aid readers in locating the item quickly in the reference list.

zurpher

Hi,

I have a disambiguation problem. I use the APA 7style.

I have one and the same author entered identically in Zotero.

Author, Firstname M.

Except of one reference (a report), it is now shown (F. M. Author, YEAR) instead of (Author, YEAR), which is quite frustrating.

I'm puzzled. What is going on?

Any help with troubleshooting is most welcome.

Quick fix:
Close WORD and ZOTERO. Restart both. Refresh Zotero references in Word. No idea why, but this worked for me.

bwiernik

It’s not clear to me exactly what you are saying is happening, but as I say above, it is correct APA style to add author initials when multiple authors have the same surname in a document. When two different first authors have the same surname, initials are added to aid readers in locating the item quickly in the reference list.

If that’s not the case here, can you describe in more detail what the behavior is? Please use the actual citations, not “Author” when you give examples.

zurpher

@bwiernik

I have two articles by two authors with the same surname.

Krüger, J. O., & Krüger, K. (2015). Skepsis im Entscheiden. Wie begründen impfskeptische Eltern ihre Impfentscheidungen? Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung, 16(1), 99–114. https://doi.org/10.3224/zqf.v16i1.22856

Krüger, K., & Krüger, J. O. (2015). „Sich selber den Kopf zerbrechen“– Eine qualitative Studie zu elterlicher Impfskepsis. Zeitschrift für Allgemeinmedizin, 91(3), 106–110. https://doi.org/10.3238/zfa.2015.0106-0110

When I reference them in the text, is the following reference output correct?

(J. O. Krüger & Krüger, 2015; K. Krüger & Krüger, 2015)

adamsmith

Yes, this is correct.

lautada

Sorry, I don't completely understand bwiernik's reply to the problem described by Mbene. If we have two authors with the same surname but their publications are from different dates (or even involve co-authors), why should their first name initial appear in an in-text citation? I can't see why there should be an ambiguity problem in these cases. I provide an example:

Ellis, N. (2011). Implicit and explicit SLA and their interface. In C. Sanz & R. Leow (Eds.), Implicit and Explicit Language Learning: Conditions, Processes, and Knowledge in SLA (pp. 35–47). Georgetown University Press.

Ellis, R. (2009). Task-based language teaching: Sorting out the misunderstandings: Task-based language teaching. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 19(3), 221–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1473-4192.2009.00231.x

Ellis, R., Skehan, P., Li, S., Shintani, N., & Lambert, C. (2020). Task-based language teaching: Theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.

So the first publication author is different from the author of the last two publications (and they were published in different years). Still, Zotero always inserts their first name initials in the in-text citations when referring to any of these publications: N. Ellis (2011) and R. Ellis (2009) or R. Ellis et al. (2020).

Is this the way to go if we follow APA 7th? I can't find the explanation in APA.

Any clarification is welcome! Thanks!!

adamsmith

So the first publication author is different from the author of the last two publications (and they were published in different years). Still, Zotero always inserts their first name initials in the in-text citations when referring to any of these publications: N. Ellis (2011) and R. Ellis (2009) or R. Ellis et al. (2020).

Is this the way to go if we follow APA 7th? I can't find the explanation in APA.

Yes, this is what the APA manual wants. There are two reasons for this:
1) The authors are sorted after each other in the bibliography, so having the initial facilitates finding the reference in a large list
2) Knowing that the first author of two publications by someone with the same name is, in fact, a different person may avoid confusion in reading.

There's no "right" answer here -- many styles choose to just add initials when they're strictly necessary and Zotero is able to do that too, but for APA style this is correct. I don't have the APA 7 manual here, but this hasn't changed from the 6th edition and APA has some examples and discussion on their blog: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/11/the-finer-points-of-apa-style-when-authors-have-the-same-surname.html (see also the comments)

lautada

Alright, now I'll just need to convince my supervisor that this is the correct way according to APA ;) Thanks!

By the way, you mentioned that Zotero is able to add initials when it's strictly necessary. Just out of curiousity, is this something that can be adjusted in the settings? Thanks again!

bwiernik

Look at section 8.20 of the 7th edition manual (this hasn’t changed since at least 5th edition either).

If you want a version without disambiguation, I have a version of that style here: https://GitHub.com/bwiernik/Zotero-tools

But is suggest you leave them in and follow the APA manual.

adamsmith

And in terms of changing this: this is part of the citation styles, so it can be adjusted there (and doing so isn't terribly hard: simply delete givenname-disambiguation-rule="primary-name"), but there isn't a Zotero setting or something you could do through the GUI.