Hi @suzanne thanks for the explanation.
This might be occuring because the citation plugin is attempting to differentiate between references by authors with the same last name and are published in the same year.
That makes sense, but this is not the case. The two publications in the example for Jahn et al. are from two different years:
Initials being “randomly” added in-text indicate Paperpile is trying to apply this guideline, i.e., to differentiate between references that have authors with the same last name. If the references are in fact by the same author, the solution is to edit the metadata of the references in your Paperpile library so that their names match exactly.
That seems to check out as it seems Paperpile parsed the metadata (for first and middle names) differently then, making one publication “Jahn, Martin T”, and the other “Jahn MT”. Seems like Paperpile is then trying to apply this method irrespective of whether there is a surname overlap within the same year. Here is another example of the same surname with the initials parsed differently, from different years:
I guess this rule confirms the behaviour, but then instead of adding the initials (per guideline), it is still adding the entire 1st and middle name (as shown above).
https://libguides.uwf.edu/c.php?g=1229476&p=8996196
For different authors with the same surname, include initials before the surname
This is a bit annoying since Paperpile is creating these troublesome instances on its own as sometimes it will parse metadata as “Surname, Name” and other times as all authors as “Surname, N.” depending on where it is getting the metadata from and the article style of different journals. So there will be numerous references in Paperpile which have different information for the author name despite many being the same author.
It still seems like this has to be handled differently by Paperpile, because it doesn’t seem like Paperpile is distinguishing whole first and middle names from just initials in the metadata. Either it should recognize that one reference has only initials of the names, and the other has full names, therefore needing to force the 2nd reference into a comparable style with initials before determining if the author from the 1st and 2nd reference is the same or a different one, to then adjust how the in-text citation should be represented based on the citation style chosen; or handle it somehow differently.
Even if it was adhering to actual guidelines in the above example, I have another weird example where there are 2 references with the same author from the same year, but then to distinguish them, instead of just adding “a”, “b”, as per guidelines, it added the the name of the 2nd author from the reference. In-text:
Actual references:
Thanks!
