I am having a problem with the in-text citation. I have the citations formatted for APA 5th, the in-text citation should have only authors’ last names and year. For all of the citations that I have downloaded the citation inserts fine but all hand entered citations add the first initial in the in-text reference so it end ups being J. Galler, 2004. This only happens in manually entered citations. I do not know what I am doing wrong, I followed the instructions for entering each field. When I manually change the in-text citation, it updates the field and re-inserts it. Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong and/or what I can do to fix this?
It’s hard to know for sure without seeing how you entered the author names. The only way I could duplicate what you mention is to enter the author names as "First Last,<comma> First Last,<comma> First Last " such as “Angela Murrell, John Smith, Steve Jones”
If you separate the names with commas then it uses whatever is before the comma as the last name.
Always enter authors names one name per line.
If that doesn’t help, call technical support, they are great!
I entered the names in a bunch of different ways, trying to solve the problem on my own (Galler being the last name):
Galler, JR.
Galler, J.R.
Galler, JR
and
Galler, J. R.
Thanks for the notice about Tech support. I’ll call them tomorrow if I haven’t worked this out since this is the last hold-up before sending to a journal for publication.
EndNote will add an initial to in-text citations whenever it thinks it is dealing with a different author - as required by the APA referencing style.
If you know you are dealing with one particular author, ensure that all instances of the author are entered exactly the same.
Often when this situation arises it is best to choose one instance, and use copy-and-paste to reenter the name into each of the other records. Even a space is significant to EndNote, and if a space occurs at the end of an author’s name it will not be visible.
Also make sure you change instances in which the author is not the first author listed; it is best to search your library (eg for Galler) to make sure you don’t miss any.
Cheers
John
Message Edited by John-Arnold on 08-11-2009 02:24 PM
5th edition APA formatting does not call for a first initial in an in-text citation only surname and year, the initial is only in the reference list. This problem is with in-text citation only, it does the reference list fine. I checked the APA manual (p207) just to be sure and it says surname only.
Normally surname and year only, yes, but APA disambiguates by using an initial if there are different authors with the same surname. Not every style does this - eg many scientific referencing styles don’t bother to disambiguate - but APA does.
For an online source that confirms this, see for example http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/tutorials/citing/apa.html (part way down under “Different authors, same surname”.
I don’t have ready access to the APA manual, but it is definitely in there somewhere (perhaps 6.14?).
Cheers,
John
I think I know what you mean now, Endnote thinks that there are multiple authors with the surname Galler because it is entered differently in the citations. I think I misunderstood what you meant. Hopefully this will fix the problem once I fix this issue. Thanks you SO MUCH!