et al and first initial showing in citations.

Good afternoon,

I am in the final stages of my dissertation and have two issues that continue to occur as I am making final editing corrections. The first is that et al is appearing as ,et al in my citations and in the reference list. I have gone to Endnote and tried to go through edit, APA 6th and then change the formatting and safe. When I go back to the document, the changes do not save and go back to the original default. The document does not make any new changes.

The second issue that I am having is a citation by B. Davis. It is showing as B. Davis and is not just showing Davis. I do not have multiple Davis in the paper. I have tried to renter the reference into Endnote and edit the author only area in the reference in Endnote and the changes do not stay.

Can you advise or send me to someone that I can speak to.

@sko wrote:
Good afternoon,

 …The first is that et al is appearing as ,et al in my citations and in the reference list. I have gone to Endnote and tried to go through edit, APA 6th and then change the formatting and safe. When I go back to the document, the changes do not save and go back to the original default. The document does not make any new changes.

The second issue that I am having is a citation by B. Davis…

Regarding the first issue. When you modify the output style, upon exiting the changes are saved as a new file which has the word “Copy” (e.g., APA 6th Copy). So you will need to adjust both EndNote and MS Word to now use the APA 6th Copy ouput styles file. 

As to the second issue, in-text citations and bibliographic reference lists cannot be edited in EndNote to remove just the first name initial.  How is the name actually entered in the reference type’s Author field?  You should go back to the “Davis” reference in your library, open it to view the Author field then either recheck the Author field to see if an extra blank space may be present or better yet, retype the name info in the Author field ensuring no blank spaces are included.

If it is still a problem after ensuring that the edited output style is used (in the word endnote ribbon or in the format bibliography menu), attach it here, and we can look for the problem.

On the author, it might be that the Davis author is a second author or subsequent author in another citation? What if you insert that ref in a brand new document with that output style?