In-text citation wrong in every style

I am using the in-text citation function in Word, but there is a single reference with four authors that insists on displaying as (Author1, Author2, Author3, et al., 2022) when it is meant to display as (Author 1, et al., 2022).

I tried the following so far:
Checked the reference in Zotero (names assigned correctly)
Deleted the paragraph, resaved and re-inserted the citation
Change the citation style
Examine the citation style code
Refreshed all citations

The error persists no matter what I do.

Has anyone encountered this before?

Thanks in advance for any advice.
  • Try in a new document.
    What style are you using?
  • Note that if you are using APA style and you have multiple citations with the same first author and year, it is correct APA style to add additional author names to disambiguate the references. Many other styles also follow this rule, so it is likely that the citations you are seeing are correct
  • I am using a modified Harvard format, saved with a new name.

    It works fine in a blank document.

    But will not work in my report.

    All tracked changes removed.
    Document resaved.
    All programmes restarted.
    Removed and reinserted the bibliography.

    I have followed the debugging protocol, but nothing has worked and I cannot start this report from scratch.
  • Your custom style has disambiguate-add-names set -- if you don't want this (see bwiernik's post for a description of what it does) remove it from the style.
  • That did it! Thank you so much!
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