One author, two works, same dates, not distinguishing

PadreGilroy
I've searched the forum and haven't found an issue exactly like this one. I'm writing a paper that cites two books by Max van Manen, both published in 2016. When I inserted the citation for the second book, I expected Zotero to distinguish between the two books by dating them 2016a and 2016b (as it did for another author in my paper). Looking back in Zotero, I realized that I had entered one of the books under "van Manen" and the other as "Van Manen" -- therefore Zotero did not recognize them as the same person. I changed the "Van" to "van," and made sure both had "Max" as the first name, but they still don't show up as a and b in my document. I even tried deleting all the references and re-inputting them, but they still both show up as 2016. Is there any way to fix this, besides manually entering the a and b into my Word doc?
  • bwiernik
    What citation style are you using?
  • PadreGilroy
    APA
  • bwiernik
    It definitely should add the letters to disambiguate. How exactly are you inserting your citations? If you open the Document Preferences window in the Zotero tab in Word, is the "Automatically update citations" box checked? If not, check it.
  • PadreGilroy
    Thanks for suggesting checking the document preferences -- but yes, the automatically update box is checked. How I am inserting the citations? Zotero tab -- Add/edit -- start typing name -- select from list.
  • bwiernik
    If you place your cursor in the first citation and then click the Add/Edit Citation button, does the Add Citation window open with the existing item already in it, or is it empty (inserting a new citation)?
  • PadreGilroy
    The existing item is in the box.
  • bwiernik
    Can you copy and paste the two citations here or share your document (just the two citations) to Dropbox or similar and give a link so I can give a look?
  • PadreGilroy
    Well, that's interesting. When I export the bibliography directly from Zotero, it includes the disambiguation. SO why isn't it doing that in Word?

    van Manen, M. (2016a). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Routledge.

    van Manen, M. (2016b). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (Second Edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
  • PadreGilroy
    And to further clarify, when I generate the bibliography in Word, it give me this (without the a and b):

    van Manen, M. (2016). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (Second Edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

    van Manen, M. (2016). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Routledge.
  • PadreGilroy
    SOLVED (sort of): I deleted one of the entries from my library in Zotero, put it back in using the ISBN, made sure the name was spelled with a lower-case v, and all of the citations in the paper fixed themselves. Except one, that still had 2016 without the b, so I inserted it manually.
  • bwiernik
    Can we take a step back please? This isn’t something you should have to do manually? Can you answer my last question? What exactly do the items look like as you have inserted them before modifying?
  • PadreGilroy
    It's okay, it's all fixed now. After making the change to my Zotero library as described above, I closed the document and reopened it and now everything appears as it should.
  • tnwong
    Interestingly, I had the exact same issue.

    I am not certain if this will help reproduce the issue (I unfortunately don't have time to check right now).

    1) Had a number of web / document entries in Zotero with no date, same organization (e.g. Amazon). Some of the authors were entered as multiple field with the organization in the last name

    2) Was working on document and was inserting references (and adding new source documents throughout)

    3) Partway through document, decided to insert bibliography

    4) Continued to insert new ambiguous references - noticed that the date field was not disambiguating (not in in-text nor reference list)

    5) Went to Zotero and changed all author fields to single field, double checked all were identical

    6) Refreshed references in MS Word using Zotero plugin - no joy

    7) Rinse and repeat for an hour; tried restarting MS Word, restarting Zotero, restarting computer, no effect.

    8) Saw this thread - attempted to export bibliography manually through Zotero - exhibits appropriate disambiguation with (Amazon, n.d.-a) (Amazon, n.d.-b)

    9) Tried to manually delete all Zotero references to ambiguous references, and manually re-add them

    10) In-text and reference citations still not appropriately disambiguating

    11) Unlinked ALL citations and deleted bibliography. Manually re-added all citations using Zotero (no different than what I had done at first)

    12) In-text and bibliography now demonstrate appropriate disambiguation behaviour


    Not sure why this caused so much frustration. Thank god I only have about two dozen references right now - this would have really annoyed me if it was in a long manuscript.

    Hopefully someone can reproduce this.
  • skaeoman
    I am trying to distinguish these two sources, both in the citation and in the bibliography:
    1. https://lessonslearned.faa.gov/ll_main.cfm?TabID=1&LLID=34&LLTypeID=4
    2. https://lessonslearned.faa.gov/ll_main.cfm?TabID=1&LLID=34&LLTypeID=11

    They are same author, same date but different page title.
    Zotero yields only one reference. Some readers are not happy with that.
    Anyone could please suggest?
    I use APA 7th and LibreWriter 7.1.5.2 with Zotero 5.0.96.3.
  • skaeoman
    FYI
    It's fixed. I just added sub title of the pages- different title, and the two references are distinguished.
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