Zotero displaying full name in citations in MS Word [resolved]

I had encountered an issue recently with Zotero diplaying the full name instead of just the surname in text citations. For example, (John Q. Smith 2010) instead of (Smith 2010). It would always be just one or two papers so it just seemed random. I would fix it by manually adjusting the entry.

Today, it popped up again, but this time I caught the mechanism as it happend! The problem? I have recently unshackled myself from Mendeley and the citations in these documents were created in Mendeley. Zotero did such a fantastic job of importing the citations, it never occured to me that they weren't perfect Zotero citations.

So, it seems that when Zotero opens a paper that was created in a different citation manager (at least in Mendeley) it masterfully imports/converts/works with the existing citations. But, it views them as separate somehow. So, if you have a converted/imported citation (of Smith et al. 2010) and then go to add another citation to (Smith et al. 2010) it will perceive you as having 2 different citations, and randomly start kicking in the first names of the lead author so you end up with (John Q. Smith et al. 2010). The only fix I have found is manually removing all of the old/imported references to that specific citation and putting them in through Zotero.

Not sure if this is really a problem or just a minor detail that needs to be streamlined when someone doesn't have something more important to do.

Details:
Windows 10x64
MS Word 2016
Zotero 5.0.55
  • If you are using the quick citation dialogue, items already cited in the document will appear at the top of the list, including those cited with Mendeley. If you cite the already cited entries, you won't have this problem.
  • Yeah, I noticed that. I prefer to have it linked to the entry in Zotero Desktop. Invariably there is something I need to change in the citation information or formatting (usually the DOI) and I want that updated information to show up in the works cited. Still, I find it odd that Zotero's response to this 'conflict' is to put first names in instead of adding a letter after the year (smith et al 2011a).
  • That's not Zotero but the citation style and it's doing this because the author's first names are slightly different, so it treats them as two different authors
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