Inline citation with multiple authors not reducing to et al.

fitzmonkey

I am new to Zotero, but I cannot find anything in the help documentation to fix this. When I select an item to cite that has multiple authors, it appears in my Zotero bar as...
Nelson et al., 2017
This is what I want it to say.
When I hit enter and the citation is created in my document, it now appears as...
(Nelson, Jarrahi, & Thomson, 2017)

It's not a big deal for a single source citation, but some of my citations have multiple works with multiple authors and the citation is longer than the paragraph!

At this point I am planning to just fix it when I am done editing, but if anyone knows how I can fix it I'd appreciate it!

dstillman

Don't edit it in the document.

This would happen if 1) the citation style requires it, based on disambiguation rules or 2) you have "Automatically update citations" disabled in the plugin's document preferences and haven't yet clicked Refresh. (The citation would show with a dashed underline in the latter case to let you know that it's not necessarily the final form of the citation.)

bwiernik

What citation style are you using?

fitzmonkey

@dstillman - I tried refreshing, and I checked the auto update feature. No issues there.

@bwiernik - I'm using APA 6.

I've also noticed that it is inconsistent - I've cited a couple of articles multiple times, and sometimes the article used et al, and sometimes it didn't.

adamsmith

APA 6 cites up to 5 authors on first mention, only the first 2 on subsequent mentions, so you're likely seeing the style behaving as intended. If you always want et al for more than 2 authors, APA 7th edition is probably your easiest solution.

fitzmonkey

@adamsmith That's the issue then! It's me, not the program. I think part of my brain knew that, but the part of my brain that was exhausted and ready to be done with finals completely spaced on that.
Thank you!