Hello!
I am writing a paper in Docs (Google): When Paperpile adds the bibliography, Paperpile includes Author First Names, rather than First Inital (followed by a period). It is doing this despite APA 6 style having been selected.
Is there an easier way to correct this error than going into each reference in Paperpile and replacing the Author First Name with Initial+Period?
Thank you!
In principle there is nothing wrong with how Paperpile handles APA style. I assume for most your papers you will get the correct initials as expected.
However, there is one caveat. If you have for example two papers from the same author and in one paper you have saved the author as “John Doe” and in the other case only as “J. Doe” Paperpile thinks these are two authors and according to APA style tries to disambiguate by adding the full first name. The solution is to make the author names always consistent.
At least this was the solution for some other users who ran into this issue.
Hi Stefan,
This was a great help, but isn’t resolving a situation where the author team share the same surname and initial. APA 7 says to leave out the initials Citing authors with the same surname But, Paperpile is formating with the first names to disambiguate (see Laura and Leonhard Dobusch in the attached). Thank you for your help.
@Terri_Griffith, this is still correct formatting as per APA disambiguation rules - just not specified in the page you shared. I believe this would be covered more in detail in the publication manual.
This blog post should clarify the matter. Although it refers to APA 6, the same rule still holds true for the 7th edition (as specified in the APA site).
Here’s another guide from an external source confirming the formatting. Hope this makes sense!
