Zotero citing second author's name for multi-author paper in-text citation

Hi, I am facing an issue that I tried to look up how to fix but could not. When I cite two papers by the same first author (and probably when both papers are of same year), Zotero put the name of the second author as well in in-text citations. For example:

What Zotero doing:

(1) Hughes, Oldroyd, et al. 2008
(2) Hughes, Ratnieks, et al. 2008
(3) Sirviö, Pamilo, et al. 2011
(4) Sirviö, Johnston, et al. 2011

What I want:

(1) Hughes et al. 2008a
(2) Hughes et al. 2008b
(3) Sirviö et al. 2011a
(4) Sirviö et al. 2011b


Any help in how to make Zotero do the following changes will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Prashant

  • ##SOLUTION##
    Finally figured out:

    I was actually facing two issues:

    ISSUE 1: Adding the initials such as (L. Ross 2015) and (C.R. Ross 2015) instead of what I want (Ross 2015a) and (Ross 2015b) according to journal guidelines.

    ISSUE 2: Now these are some authors who published in the same years:

    What Zotero was doing:

    (1) Hughes, Oldroyd, et al. 2008
    (2) Hughes, Ratnieks, et al. 2008
    (3) Sirviö, Pamilo, et al. 2011
    (4) Sirviö, Johnston, et al. 2011

    What I wanted:

    (1) Hughes et al. 2008a
    (2) Hughes et al. 2008b
    (3) Sirviö et al. 2011a
    (4) Sirviö et al. 2011b

    This is what I did:

    I downloaded the CSL file for the style I was using (CSE) from here (https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=cse) and saved it as council-of-science-editors-author-date1.csl (added 1 as a suffix).
    Opened the file in a text editor, searched for the line where 'disambiguate' was mentioned, and deleted the disambiguate names, and given names.

    Basically from:

    citation et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" disambiguate-add-names="true" disambiguate-add-givenname="true"

    to:

    citation et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true"

    The above codes are contained within < and > but cannot type here for some reason so make sure you have those greater and less than signs intact.

    Saved the file. Opened Zotero> Preferences> Cite>Styles (On a Macbook, might differ in Windows) and added this new style file. It did replace the old style but does not show it over there since it just takes the name of the file from the XML codes.
    Now, go back to your word file>Zotero add-in, do a Refresh, and bam!

    Hopefully, it will help someone with low technical skills like me since I struggled to figure out this :(
  • Note that the CSE style guide calls for names or initials to be added, rather than a/b, when the author groups are different.
Sign In or Register to comment.