APA Citation Format Errors

Hello,

I’m having an issue with certain citations displaying incorrect APA formatting.  For instance, I would like a book by the author Kathleen Burke with a publishing year of 2016 to begin a sentence.  The correct APA format would be Burke (2016)… However, EndNote is consistently entering K. Burke (2016).  I’m also having the same issue with standard citations.  EndNote is consistently displaying the first initial of the author’s name.  I don’t believe this is a style issue as EndNote isn’t doing this for all entries.  I have 413 citations and approximately 30 are incorrect.

I’ve verified that the EndNote entry is correct and the Word fieldcode is also correct {burke, 2016@@author-year}.

Running EndNote 8.1 / macOS 10.13.1 / Word 2016 (15.4)

Any suggestions as to what is going on and more importantly, how to fix it.

Respectfully,

Shaun

This is because APA requires disambiguation of same surname authors who are different.  So K Burke and J Burke would need to be distinguished in the citation.  

However, endnote is not very good at figuring out that Burke, K. and Burke, Kieth  or sometimes even Burke, K. and K Burke are the same author.  The best way to avoid this, is to open the references with K Burke in them and copy from one record, replacing the other K equivalent authors.  

This is explained in a more detail, but back to front (That is, the usual cause and fix is in the last two paragraphs), here: https://support.clarivate.com/Endnote/s/article/EndNote-Removing-author-name-initials-from-APA-Style?language=en_US 

If you want to override this - you can change the output style instead, but then you run the risk of not conforming to the requirments of the publisher were there are two different authors with the same surname.  (here is one set of instructions to do so: http://libguides.usd.edu/content.php?pid=63203&sid=5661477)

Leanne,

Thank you for the response.  I do have two authors with the name Burke however, they are different years.  One is Burke (2001) and the other is Burke (2016).  I believe the only time you should use the initial is when the authors have the same name and same year.

Bigger issue is that EndNote is not consistently doing this.  A majority of the citiations are correct where I have duplicates.  It is just a few authors where this is occurring.

Respectfully,

Shaun

I agree, it appears that different years and the inaccurate application of the rule is hit and miss.  I haven’t figured out the difference between the records where it works and where it doesn’t.