Yes, I will up-vote a similar concern about the Harvard style having the same problem (it appears) but this is crucial for users of the APA style. The a, b, c method is fine for same author, same year, different publication, but how on God's green earth did you come up with adding author initials to make distinctions? Please get it right. We have an institutional account with you and students use writ'n'cite to enter APA correctly.

I have a related problem that I have reported as a bug, but that Refworks support doesn't seem to acknowledge.
I'm citing two journal articles with the same first author and year, but article A having five co-authors and article B having two co-authors. The Harvard style handles them correctly but all APA styles fail:
The first time I cite them, A is cited as (author1 et al., 2017) and B as (author1, author2, & author3, 2017) which is correct. However, all succeeding citations are displayed as (author1 et al., 2017). Thus, the reader will not know if I'm citing A or B.
And yes, all data are correct in the database records, the correct output in Harvard confirms that. I actually have several "pairs" of references like A and B, and the same problem appears with all of them.

WnC 4.5 deals with authors that have the same surname differently to WnC 4.4. Our style is based on a version of Harvard and in WnC 4.4 in text citations for authors with the same surname are given the suffix of a,b etc onto the date e.g: (Smith, 2008a), (Smith, 2008b) to distinguish them. In the new version (4.5) if these authors have different initials, then that is added into the citation e.g: (A. Smith, 2008), (B. Smith, 2008).

If the citations in question have different years - then initials are added to that as well e.g: (A. Smith, 2008), (C. Smith, 1956).

Even if there are multiple different authors and a different date, then initials are still added e.g: (A. Smith, 2008), (D. Smith, Brown and Jones, 1968). My university continuiusly flags any initials in the citations as an error and asks for ammendments.

Furthermore, in cases where there are multiple authors, some of which are the same, my university will only accept Smith et al. 2008 where there are two or more authors. The latest version of Write n Cite includes all of the authors names until the chain is broken. Previously these citations would have appeared as Smith et al 2008a and Smith et al 2008b.

Please offer the option of a true Harvard style without initials.

I am having this exact problem. I can no longer use Refworks as it does not confirm to my institution's referencing requirements. When speaking to someone from Refworks they were unable to grasp why this is an issue and can't offer a solution for it, this needs addressing urgently.

This needs changing ASAP, it is causing us a lot of problems, perhaps we need to look for an alternative to Refworks?

It seems that RefWorks automatically formats bib entries this way: if author is the same as another entry (or title is the same, if there is no author), and year is the same, the citation inserts an “a” and “b” behind the year. This is unnecessary for my purposes, and I can find no reference to this in the Chicago Style Notes and Bib (Author-Date is different and not what I use). How can I delete this default from the style editor?

Kind of similar problem with two articles by the same main author released the same year. The style I'm using is supposed to allow only one author shown in the citation, unless there is two authors. Now the citation prints three names to differentiate between the two articles instead of the a/b suffix. The amount of names in the citation should never be overridden! This has worked well in the past but it seems the current version doesn't.

This change does not conform to proper Harvard Referencing so makes a mockery of WnC as a usable resource. This needs an urgent fix lest it become an academic complaint issue.

This change doesn't make any sense as the initials are added even in citations where authors with the same surname have published in different years. If you have the same author publishing in different years the a, b etc is not added as, presumably, RefWorks does not consider them to be ambiguous. So why are different authors publishing in different years not dealt with in the same way? It's very annoying!