Question about references

Sara Jovovic
Hi!
I'm using APA style and for references that have the same author and year, Zotero will name them ''a'' and ''b". For example: (Monteiro, 2019a) and (Monteiro, 2019b).
But there's 2 specific references where instead of using ''a'' and ''b'', it differentiated them by naming the first 3 authors:
(Monteiro, Cannon, Levy et al., 2019)
(Monteiro, Cannon, Lawrence et al., 2019)

One is a report and the other is a journal article. Is that the reason why? Those references are used quite a lot in my document and it's a heavy document so changing it manually, (one by one) would be almost impossible. Any suggestions? Is this normal and if not, should I change it and how? Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    Using additional authors before et al to disambiguate non-identical author groups is correct APA style, yes.
  • Sara Jovovic
    I understand it's correct, but it's not consistent with the rest of the document. Is that a problem for a masters thesis?
  • adamsmith
    It's a consistent rule, it's just a different one from always using et al. for 3+ authors.
    I can't tell you what your institution's or advisor's expectations for your thesis are, but if you are supposed to use APA style, this is the only correct option.
  • Sara Jovovic
    I just mean that for the other references with the same author and date, it referenced it as (Monteiro, 2019a) and (Monteiro, 2019b) instead on using 3+ authors. So I was wondering why it didn't generate it the same way for the 2 references above (in my first comment). But it could be because the document type is different (report vs journal article with same author and date)?
  • adamsmith
    No, it's because they are not by the same authors. For one, the 3rd author is Lawrence, for the other it's Levy.
  • bwiernik
    In APA, adding letters for disambiguation is only used when the whole author team is the same. When the author teams differ, additional names are shown instead. This is because different author teams will be ordered differently in the bibliography and listing more names helps the reader to locate the item in the bibliography.

    As adamsmith is saying, the behavior you are seeing is correct APA style.
  • Sara Jovovic
    Ah, I see. Ok, thank your for you answer.
Sign In or Register to comment.