Problem with citation

Support
#1

I still have a free version of the paperpile on my google docs. So, I am not sure if I have the moral standing to raise a question.

So, I have a particular citation Shepherd et al., 2017. I have observed that sometimes it changes to D. A. Shepherd et al., 2017. I have missed it on two occasions making such mistake was embarrassing. I did not tell my professor that an add-on I used did it automatically. It becomes easy to notice because my document has that particular citation multiple times.

Is there any thing I can do to make sure I do not face this problem.

#2

This is a result of disambiguation and happens whenever two or more authors have the same last name but different first names/initials. If these are in fact the same author, you must edit the metadata so that their names match exactly. For the sidebar, this can be done by going to gear --> Manage references.