Citations not appearing as expected (behaviour of initials and multiple publications per year)

nick riches

Hi. I am a long time Zotero user, and think I know the software reasonably well. However, I am baffled by its recent behaviour. Firstly, it keeps adding initials to authors' names, even though I have double-checked that, in the database, that author is referred to using a unique name. Secondly, when an author has two publications per year, it is failing to differentiate them use 2002a, 2003, 2002c etc. I thought that was the default behaviour? (NB Style is APA7, and I am using fields on Word on a Mac). Thanks.

nick riches

P.S. I have downgraded to APA6, and suddenly the citations are properly formatted, so this seems to be an issue with the APA7 style file. Is there a new one on the horizon?

nick riches

P.P.S. Style was downloaded on 4th November. This seems to be the latest generic APA style provided within Zotero. Perhaps someone has published an APA7 style file which resolves these issues on another website?

bwiernik

The Zotero APA style follows the APA manual for both of these rules.

Note that the rules from the manual are:
1. If two items are written by authors with the same last name but different first names, add initials to differentiate them. (See this page for details if initials are appearing for the same person, not two different people with the same last name.)
2. If two items have the same first author but different subsequent authors, add additional names until the citation is no longer ambiguous.
3. Only if the items have exactly the same author team and the same publication year, add letters to the year to disambiguate.

Zotero implements these rules. If that is not the behavior you are seeing, please say exactly what you are seeing with real examples. (I don’t believe any of these changed between APA 6 and APA 7 if I recall correctly, but I might be misremembering, it’s been a while since I wrote that part of the style.)

nick riches

Thanks. The Zotero APA7 style does not seem to be following these rules. For example, when referring to an individual who does not require disambiguating, initials are added, and no letters are added to the year when necessary. As mentioned, the APA6 style works fine in this regard. I am not sure how best to provide a worked example to demonstrate that this is happening, bar sending through the actual document. Could the style have got corrupted somehow? Should I reload it? Could an add-on be interfering (I use BetterBibtex)?

adamsmith

I think chances that this is due to Better BibTeX or style corruption are basically zero, so no need to look there.

Can your reproduce this in the Zotero Style Editor (Tools --> Developer --> Style editor)?

How about in a new document with the exact same citations?

nick riches

I saved the document under a new name, and the problem seems to have resolved itself. So this looks like some kind of corruption regarding how options were stored within the document. Sorry for delay in responding - I have been busy. Thanks for the help.