EndNote desktop: FAQs and tips

What APA says:

2 (or more) articles by the same author in the same year: 

Append a and b (etc) to the year to differentiate citations and references.

• "... the prevalence of drop bears in Queensand (Smith, 2018a) and Victoria (Smith, 2018b) ..."
• Smith, J. (2018a). Drop bears in Queensland.
• Smith, J. (2018b). Drop bears in Victoria.

EndNote knows how to do this.

2 different primary authors with same family name writing in the same year:

Add author initials to differentiate. 

• "... the prevalence of drop bears in Queensland (A. Smith, 2018) and Victoria (B. Smith, 2018) ..."
• Smith, A. (2018). Drop bears in Queensland.
• Smith, B. (2018). Drop bears in Victoria.

EndNote knows how to do this, but it does it for all authors, not just primary authors - this is a reasonable extrapolation and interpretation of the APA rules (which do not specify disambiguation in this case).

• (Smith & A. Jones, 2018) and (Smith & B. Jones, 2018)

References with different multiple authors and the same primary author in the same year:

Add authors until citations are different:

• (Smith, Green, Jones, et al., 2015)
• (Smith, Green, Tang, et al., 2015)

EndNote knows how to do this.

What PhD supervisors and some editors often prefer:

A surprisingly common experience: Many editors and supervisors are either not familiar with the above rules, or regard them as too complex, so they would prefer to see all in-text citations as (Smith, 2015a) and (Smith, 2015b) or (Jones et al., 2015a) and (Jones et al., 2015b) even if these are different primary authors or have other different co-authors.

How to set up EndNote to please your supervisor/editor:

Note: this will change the main EndNote program style settings on a specific computer, it does not change within your EndNote library, so you cannot take your EndNote library and Word file to a different computer and retain the changed style.

1. In EndNote, ensure you have selected style you wish to modify

2. Tools menu > Output Styles > Edit "<name of style>" (e.g. Tools > Output Styles > Edit "APA 7th")

3. Under Citations , select Ambiguous Citations

• :Untick Include the author initials or full name in citation to prevent author initials (or names) being added to the in-text citations.
• Unitck Add more authors until the citation is unique to prevent extra authors in multiple author citations.

4. Change to the Author Name section, still under Citations.

• Untick Use initials only for primary authors with the same name

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​5. Use File menu > Save As to save your modified style.

6. Change the name to indicate your changes to the style

7. Select your modified style for use in EndNote and Word