No letters after year in in-text citation for two articles with same authors on publication year

edited May 8, 2023
Dear all

I am trying to cite these two articles which have the same of the team and were published in the same year, in an in-text citation in APA 7 style:


Smith, L. E., Potts, H. W. W., Amlȏt, R., Fear, N. T., Michie, S., & Rubin, G. J. (2022). Patterns of social mixing in England changed in line with restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic (September 2020 to April 2022). Scientific Reports, 12(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14431-3

Smith, L. E., Potts, H. W. W., Amlôt, R., Fear, N. T., Michie, S., & Rubin, G. J. (2022). How has the emergence of the Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern influenced worry, perceived risk and behaviour in the UK? A series of cross-sectional surveys. BMJ Open, 12(8), e061203. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2022-061203

I was under the impression that these should be cited as (Smith et al., 2022a) and (Smith et al., 2022b)

However I just get:
(Smith, Potts, Amlôt, et al., 2022)

(Smith, Potts, Amlȏt, et al., 2022)

Am I wrong, or have I found a bug?

Any help would be appreciated!

  • You have two different versions of ô, which means that for Zotero, those are two different authors and in then follows APA to list up to the first differing author in the text. If you align the authors in Zotero you'll get the expected result.
  • Oh dear, that was embarrassingly stupid of me! Nonetheless, thank you for the very quick response.
  • Not a stupid mistake at all! That’s definitely a tricky typography issue and not something most folks would pick up on.
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