APA 6th style incorrectly formatting same author, same year citations

nrs008
I have a few instances of same author, same year citations and they are being incorrectly formatted using the APA 6 style. The APA 6 guidelines state that letter suffixes should be placed after the year when this occurs (e.g., Smith, 2006a; Smith, 2006b; Smith, 2006c).

When I add two citations (same author, same year), the in-text citations format correctly as follows: "(Smith, 2006a)" and "(Smith, 2006b)." However, the references in the bibliography do not format accordingly. They simply appear as "Smith, P. (2006)" and "Smith, P. (2006)," rather than "Smith, P. (2006a)" and "Smith, P. (2006b)."

When I add a third reference by Smith (2006), the in-text citations stop formatting correctly and now appear as "(Smith, 2006)", "(Smith, 2006)", and (Smith, 2006)," rather than "(Smith, 2006a)", "(Smith, 2006b)", and (Smith, 2006c)." The references in the bibliography also continue formatting incorrectly.

I created a new document to try to narrow down the problem, but Zotero formats the citations and bibliography in the same incorrect way. Zotero was previously handling these references fine, but is no longer doing so. The update for this style is 5/25/16.

I would appreciate any help anyone can provide.
  • fbennett
    I don't get exactly that behavior, but I can confirm that it's broken.

    Will see what can be done about it.
  • fbennett
    edited June 2, 2016
    I've tracked down the cause. It looks like the changes introduced to address this bug have pretty comprehensively messed up year-suffix disambiguation in this more common case.

    I will revert those changes first, so that Zotero team can make a choice of which damage to suffer with, and begin looking into this tomorrow. It may take until the end of the weekend before it's sorted out, and several days after for the fix to work its way into Zotero. Sorry about that.
  • nrs008
    Ok, much appreciated. I'll update and refresh things next week. Thanks for looking into this.
  • fbennett
    Got a fix in place. You can try the repaired processor by installing one of the Propachi plugins. (When the next Zotero update comes out, the plugin can be removed.)
  • nrs008
    edited June 6, 2016
    I went ahead and installed the Propachi Vanilla plugin and it has resolved the problem. Thanks so much for working on this!
  • fbennett
    No problem -- I was really surprised that this bug snuck through the rather-large processor test suite before the initial release, and it's good to have it fixed. Thanks for reporting!
  • AlpyBoy
    I work mainly with the stand alone version on Linux, 4.0.29.10.
    What can I do to fix this behavior on APA 6?
  • bwiernik
    Install the Propachi plugin fbennet links to above. Download the .xpi file (I recommend the Uppercase Subtitles version for use with APA), then in Zotero Standalone, open the Tools menu, choose Add-ons, click the gear icon in the upper right of the window, and choose Install Add-on from File. Then, choose the downloaded .xpi for the Propachi plugin.
  • AlpyBoy
    edited June 24, 2016
    Great!
    Thank you so much bwiernik!
    Downloaded it at:

    https://github.com/Juris-M/propachi-upper/releases/tag/v1.1.43

    With right click: "save link as..."
  • esthersmaill
    Hi there, I am experiencing the same issue that nrs008 reported back in June. Added to that I am having the problem of the first instance of a reference for a same author, same year situation not being cited as "a". For example, I have at least five references for (Ministry of Education, 2010) in lengthy document (12 000+ words) and the first instance of this appears as (Ministry of Education, 2010e). I tried using/downloading the Propachi Vanilla plugin in the hope that this would fix both these problems but it has fixed neither. Any assistance you could provide me would be much appreciated. Thanks!!
  • adamsmith
    For the second issue -- note that (in line with APA requirements) the suffix letters a,b,c,d etc. don't get added by order of appearance in the text, but by order of appearance in the bibliography, which is determined by the title. Or are you saying there is no a-d at all?
  • esthersmaill
    Face palm!! Thank you for clarifying that for me adamsmith. Much appreciated. Someone gave me some misleading feedback - which confused me in this regard - but I should have checked before posting.
  • JacobsMelbourne
    Thanks for this. It fixed the suffix issue but replaced it with another.

    Report numbers for respective bibliography entries are behaving strangely and replacing text with 'NaN'.

    They're showing up as 'IW102400-0000-NaN-NaN-0010'

    The correct entry (which in Zotero is 'IW102400-0000-NP-RPT-0010'

    Any ideas what could be the cause?
  • fbennett
    Yeah, this apparently needs attention in the latest versions. I have some breathing space in the schedule tonight and tomorrow morning, I'll try to take a look.
  • adamsmith
    (There's one related report of this @fbennett ; have you seen this or should I try to help dig it up for you?)
  • JacobsMelbourne
    Hi there, just wondering whether a solution has been found to this?
  • adamsmith
    Which Zotero version are you running? I think this is fixed in the latest, but the Standalone is not released on all platforms.
  • JacobsMelbourne
    Ah I see. I'm running standalone 4.029.10. I'll give the firefox version a go.
  • korneel
    Had the same issue. Use the Firefox add-on version when and refresh your citations and bibliography and you should be fine.
  • adamsmith
    You could also install this add-on in Standalone: https://github.com/Juris-M/propachi-vanilla/releases/latest
    all it does is switch out the citation processor for the most recent version.
    (Download the .xpi and install from tools--> add-ons --> tool icon--> Install from file)
Sign In or Register to comment.