redundant first initials in citations

dougwyu
I have 2 citations, and when I include them in the same document, the citations list the first initials, and don't know why.

(C. G. S. Araújo et al., 2025)
(M. B. Araújo et al., 2019)

maybe the accented ú has something to do with it?


Araújo, C. G. S., De Souza E Silva, C. G., Myers, J., Laukkanen, J. A., Ramos, P. S., & Ricardo, D. R. (2025). Sitting–rising test scores predict natural and cardiovascular causes of deaths in middle-aged and older men and women. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, zwaf325. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwaf325

Araújo, M. B., Anderson, R. P., Márcia Barbosa, A., Beale, C. M., Dormann, C. F., Early, R., Garcia, R. A., Guisan, A., Maiorano, L., Naimi, B., O’Hara, R. B., Zimmermann, N. E., & Rahbek, C. (2019). Standards for distribution models in biodiversity assessments. Science Advances, 5(1), eaat4858. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aat4858
  • adamsmith
    That's correct APA style. Different first authors with the same last name always get initials in text to distinguish them
  • dougwyu
    strange to me in experience. Araújo et al. (2019 | 2025) should be enough to distinguish them, and that is what I see in published papers too.
  • bwiernik
    It is absolutely correct APA style. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/citing-authors-same-surname

    The two names are alphabetized in different places in the reference list. The initials indicate to the reader which position to search in.
  • adamsmith
    There are many citation styles that do this differently -- including the majority of author date styles available for Zotero -- so if you don't need to/mean to use APA, it'd be easy to find one that only adds initials where they are strictly necessary for disambiguation and pretty easy to find one that never uses initials.
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