citation adding extra names

cciaran
Hi,

I have been using OU Harvard for some time but yesterday one of my reference started acting funny.

rather than citing as e.g. (Lock et al., 2019) it is now citing as (Lock, Stock, Barrell et al., 2018). It was not doing this a couple of days ago.

It is not doing this for any other multiple author citations.
When I update the citatiton it offers me (Lock, 2018) but as soon as I refresh it returns it to (Lock, Stock, Barrell et al., 2018).

There are no other papers Lock et al papers

There are 2 other references for Stock, Lock, Barrell and Smith, (2015a) (2015b) these have no issues.

This particular paper is Lock, Stock, Barrell and Jones.

I have removed all other styles in case it was somehow using APA

I have checked the .csl it looks ok



I tried removing the entry and adding it from several different sources, the issue persists.

I changed disambiguate-add-names="true" to "false", no change.


Any suggestions would be great as I have 20+ citations from this article


Many thanks

  • bwiernik
    What citation style are you using?
  • cciaran
    edited September 2, 2019
    OU (Open University) Harvard
  • adamsmith
    Have you tried in a new document? Same issue or does that cite OK?
  • cciaran
    Just checked, it doesn't do it in another document with the same citation
  • adamsmith
    Then there are really only two options:
    1) Most likely, you didn't actually swap the styles for one with disambiguate-add-names="false" in the document or
    2) Less likely, the existing document uses an item with incorrect metadata embedded in the document. I'd guess that looking at the bibliography would show the problem.
  • cciaran
    The disambiguate is definitely changed to false.

    And as mentioned in the original post, I have removed and replaced the reference a number of times using different sites and using both the chrome add-on and importing the .ris
  • adamsmith
    How did you check that the style uses disambiguate-add-names="false"? It's not like you can see the setting in the style you use in a given document.

    I'm also a bit confused by your description of swapping out references -- if you imported the reference multiple times, how do you know which version is used in the document?

    Again, I'd recommend looking at the bibliography if you haven't already.

    Another thing to check is what happens if you try to switch to a completely different citation style like IEEE or Vancouver and back. (You'd need to re-install those, but it's not like Zotero gets confused between citation styles randomly).
  • cciaran
    Thanks for the feedback.

    OK, if I understand correctly, the style is already set in the document and changing the txt in the .cli will not effect that?

    I only ever have kept one copy of the reference in Zotero, and after deleting the old reference, I went through and updated all the relevent citations document. It was treating this reference fine until I was forced to update the weekend.

    As it is, for a work around and because my paper is due, I simply reset all the citations to the correct style, saved a copy of the document. Created the biblography on the copy (which screwed up the citations again), unlinked the citations on my original document and pasted the list in there.

    Thanks for the suggestions, but I'm not sure if I can check because my deadline is looming and I can't afford to tinker with it.


    I suppose the lesson in all this, is not to update your reference manager the week your thesis is due.

  • cciaran
    * ...updated all the relevent citations IN THE document.
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