Hello,
For some papers, paperpile in-text citation in Word (on Mac) shows, for APA 7, either the first name initial or first name spelled out. It should only show the last name. For example, it shows (D.J. Teece, 2007), but should show (Teece, 2007). I can only make that go away by manually editing the entry on paperpile.com. Why is that?
Secondly, when citing several papers, paperpile in Word doesn’t sort them in chronological order. For example in my case for dynamic capabilities, it shows as (D. J. Teece, 2007; D. J. Teece et al., 1997; D. Teece & Leih, 2016). How can I fix that?
Thank you
Joachim
Joachim, check you PP entries. IME, #1 is caused by entries that have slightly different author names. #2 looks correct - the citations are sorted by name
Welcome to our forum, @Joachim_Jake_Layes! As Bruce accurately suggests, initials being “randomly” added in-text is usually the result of disambiguation, where the system tries to differentiate between authors with the same surname (as detailed in this APA guideline). If these are in fact the same author, the solution is to edit the metadata so that their names match exactly.
If this doesn’t make sense, feel free to share your manuscript (or a copy with just a few of the affected citations) and we can take a look/go over specific corrections. You can send that via chat or email (support@paperpile.com).
Thank you, @Bruce_Borkosky and @vicente for your speedy reply. I have in the meanwhile done the following: I had exported all references of my paper from PP to a .bib file and imported them into another referencing tool competitive to yours. I used their MS Word plug-in and inserted the same reference and got a correct citation, in my example (Teece, 2007), and not (D.J. Teece, 2007).
@vicente –I can send my paper to you to the email you’ve indicated in your reply, if you think that could help. Please let me know what I shall put in the email’s title so you can recognize it based on our conversation here.
Thank you,
Joachim
Thanks @Joachim_Jake_Layes, yes, I would be interested in looking at the references myself to try reproducing. The email title can be the same as this thread’s.
1 Like
Hi all, I am not sure if there is a solution on this kind of situation.
I am a newbie to Paperpile. While I have been enjoying using it for a manuscript that I am working on on the Google Doc, I have encountered a situation like what @Joachim_Jake_Layes have described. From a quick self-troubleshooting, I understand that Paperpile recognize the author who are the first in multiple papers but their first names were spelled slightly different (all items are imported either from my Mendeley or directly from the search functionality embedded by Paperpile). For examples, I have cited differebt papers with Ann Pearson as the first author. Using the American Geophysical Union (AGU) citation style (which follows APA style), the in-text citations sometimes appear “…(Pearson et al. xxxx).” or “…(Ann Pearson et al. xxxx).” — I believe this is due to the first name of this author in the two papers are different; one with “Pearson, A” and the other with “Pearson, Ann”.
I have used other citation management tools, including EndNote and Mendeley, and they can handle this situation quite well without requiring a hardwired, manual edit on metadata of the whole reference library.
It will be greatly helpful if Paperpile offers the same functionality.
Best,
Ronnie
Hello. I have the exact same problem. I have been working primarily with paperpile together with google docs and this has not been a problem there. But then for this one paper I have had to use MS Word, and then this problem started occurring. I sincerely hope that Paperpile can offer a fix for this problem, since I see that it was reported more than 2 years ago.
Welcome to our forum, @Ingjerd, and thanks for pitching in here. Upon attempting to reproduce, we found that this is handled incorrectly in GDocs. The team has logged the issue to address it when next updating the citation plugin.
The APA rule I mentioned in my last reply above still holds true, which makes the behavior in MS Word correct. Authors with the same surname must be disambiguated, and when there are differences in the metadata the system must default to that rule — which is why the only solution is to ensure the metadata in the library matches exactly (if it’s indeed the same author).
To use @Ronnie_R’s example — the A in Pearson, A could stand for Ann, Anne, Anna, Anja… so automatically matching it to Pearson, Ann could lead to incorrect formatting and confusion for the reader.
