First name appears in text despite only one author

Asker

I know that an author's first name typically appears in the in text citation when there is more than one author with the same last name, but now it happens even when it's the same author cited mutiple times. The author's name is entered the same way everywhere. What could be the problem?

bwiernik

First, what style are you using? Some styles always show the first name.

If that’s not the case, 2 things come to mind:

1. You’ve entered the name in single-field mode (“First Last”) in Zotero rather than two-field mode (“Last” || “First”). Don’t do that. Single-field mode is for institutions.

2. One of the citations is disconnected from your library. Go to the citation with the different from the others and open the Add/Edit Citation window. Click the blue button for the citation and see if it has the “Show in My Library” button. If it’s missing, delete that citation and reinsert it from your library.

Asker

It seems it's neither of those options. At first I thought it was because the author's name was entered differently for the two different sources in the library, but I fixed that and the problem still remains.

damnation

Can you also provide the name of the citation style you have set under Document Preferences as Bwiernik asked? This helps with troubleshooting this for you.

Asker

Yes, sorry! It's APA 7

bwiernik

Ah, okay. In that case, you have citations to two different authors with the same last name. When that happens, APA calls for initials to be added to disambiguate the authors.

Asker

Yes but it's the same author, same full name, still one citation has the first name and the other one does not

bwiernik

Could you upload your document to Dropbox or similar and link here?

adamsmith

Test in a new document. This part of the code almost certainly doesn't have any bugs, so if the authors definitely look the same in Zotero, there's likely an old version stored in the document that has a different first name (See bwiernik's 2. above)