RCM Issue: Citing Works with the Same Author and Year
According to APA 7 #8.18 Avoiding Ambiguity in In-Text Citations (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/same-year-first-author#:~:text=To%20avoid%20ambiguity%2C%20when%20the,al.%E2%80%9D%20in%20every%20citation ), multiple authors should still be listed in in-text citations to avoid ambiguity, when citing multiple works by three or more authors published in the same year.
However, based on our review, it seems that the current RCM does not consider this special scenario. For works with three or more authors, it only include the name of the first author followed by “et al.”, without considering the ambiguity rules. Based on our dummy paper, which includes three references with three or more authors from the same year. In this case, RCM only adds “et al.” for all references following the first author as follows:
(Cheng et al., 2013a)
(Cheng et al., 2013b)
(Cheng et al., 2013c)
However, based on the above APA webpage showing #8.18, for proper citation, it should differentiate by writing out as many names as needs to distinguish the references, and abbreviate the rest of the names to “et al.” in every citation. Based on our understanding, if following APA 7 rule, the in-text citations for these three references will be displayed as follows:
(Cheng, Ip, et al., 2013)
(Cheng, Lam, et al., 2013a)
(Cheng, Lam, et al., 2013b)
The user has also informed us that the old version, i.e., Write-n-Cite can handle the rule of APA 7, #8.18 “Avoiding Ambiguity in In-Text Citations”, but it cannot be handled in the new version, i.e. RCM.
Would you please check whether the issue can be considered for review. Thank you.
Siu-chung
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