Hello. I have a series of citations by the same first author (each of which I have cited previously in my paper) that I am trying to cite at the same time. I want it to look something like this, with the general Smith et al. citation followed by the years chronologically (Smith et al., 1995a, 1995b, 1996). The problem is that all of the works have different second authors, so Endnote is sorting them alphabetically based on the second author and repeating the Smith et al. before each year. It looks something like this (Smith et al., 1996; Smith et al., 1995a; Smith et al., 1995b). Does anyone have any idea how to fix this problem?
If you are sure that the way you want the author order within the citation is the way that the publisher wants them, you need to change the sorting parameters in the style you are using. Edit>Output Style> Edit “selected style”. Under citation, you probably will want the sort order to be Year, then Author. save it as a new name. Make sure you then change the format bibliography dialog to use the new style.
I strongly recommend contacting the publisher and have them confirm that is the correct way they want the citation formatted.
EndNote is not formatting it that way because the authors are different. I as a reader I see (Smith et al., 1995a, 1995b, 1996) to mean that all of the authors for the 1995a reference wrote the 1995b and 1996 articles also. Seeing the Smith et al. appearing before each year tells me that there are different authors for the three articles.
If you use the Edit Citation command in Word you can exclude the Author and Years for the 1995b and 1996 references. Enter “, 1995b, 1996” in the suffix field of the 1995a reference.