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I’m using an Author-date style and the citations are displaying author initials or the full name – what do I do?

If you've formatted your citations in an author-date style (APA for example), and you notice that different citations with the same author are displaying with the full name or initials, for example: (J. Brown, 2016), and also (James Brown, 2016), this is a result of the disambiguation rules of the style being triggered.

Essentially, if you have slightly different author details in the reference metadata then the style assumes the authors are different and puts the initial or full name in the citation to disambiguate the entries. To fix this:

  1. Go to the Lean Library Workspace site and open the edit metadata window for these references
  2. Make sure the author details are exactly the same for each reference cited (pay extra attention to the first name/initial field - even one character's difference, or just an empty space is enough to trigger the disambiguation rules).
  3. After you've done this, go back to your document and refresh your citations and they should fix themselves - in the example citations provided above, both should now display as (Brown, 2016).

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