Ambiguous Citations
With in-text citations like (Smith, 1995) or (Smith 246-9), references can have identical in-text citations if they are by the same author or the authors have the same last name. This leads to ambiguity in the citations that would make it impossible for the reader of your paper to know to which reference by Smith you are referring. EndNote provides various ways to avoid this sort of ambiguity in your citations.
Any combination of the following options may be used. Click in the checkbox next to all options that apply. Note that these settings assume the author is used in the in-text citation. They are not relevant for styles that use bibliography numbers for the in-text citations as it is not possible to have ambiguous citations when they are uniquely numbered.
- Include author initials in citation
Check this option to have EndNote include initials with author names to distinguish between citations by different authors that happen to have the same surname. Select how the initials should appear from the Initials option in the section. For example, the MLA style uses just author names and page numbers in citations. Initials are added to clarify which Smith wrote the cited reference:
(S. Smith 241-5) and (L. Smith 12-20)
- List more authors until citation is unique
Some styles request that only a fixed number of authors be listed in the in-text citation, and then "et al." or "and others" is inserted to indicate that the author list was abbreviated. Select this option if you would like EndNote to list additional authors to make the citation unique. For example, if the in-text citations were set to list only 3 authors, and you have two references in which the first three authors are the same, EndNote would add a fourth author to the citations, and continue in that manner until the list of authors was different between the two citations. - Add the title for different works by the same author(s)
If you have two works by the same author, it won’t help to add initials or list more authors to differentiate the two. In this case, some styles request that the title of the reference (or a shortened form of the title) be added to the in-text citation. If you choose this option and select the Short Title option, EndNote includes the contents of the Short Title field when available. Otherwise, it uses the full title. The format of the title is taken directly from the bibliography. This is an example in the MLA style, which normally includes only the author and page number in a citation:
(Smith, History of Our Times 35)
(Smith, Looking Forward 77)
- Add a letter after the year
For citations in an (Author, Year) format, EndNote can add a letter to the year to make citations from the same author published in the same year distinguishable from each other. The letter appended to the year will appear in both the in-text citations and references in the bibliography.
(Smith 1995a)
(Smith 1995b)