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I have used LaTeX for some time now for writing academic articles, but encountered an error which I haven't seen before. When citing an article in-text, the first letter of the name of the author is also shown.

This is an example of a LaTeX line where the problem occurs:

\textcite{YuFangZhuMa2019} develop an exact polynomial-time algorithm with the use of the Karush-Kun-Tucker conditions.

The result is

Q. Yu et al. (2019) develop an exact polynomial-time algorithm with the use of the Karush-Kun-Tucker conditions.

Q. Yu et al. (2019)

In the preamble I've used the biblatex package as follows:

\usepackage[style=apa,backend=biber]{biblatex}

And the corresponding bibliography entry is as follows:

@article{YuFangZhuMa2019,
author = {Yu, Q. and Fang, F. and Zhu, N. and Ma, S.},
title = {{A Matheuristic Approach to the Orienteering Problem with Service Time Dependent Profits}},
journal = {European Journal of Operations Research},
year = 2019,
volume = 273,
number = 2,
pages = {488-503},
doi = {10.1016/j.ejor.2018.08.007}
}

As with all other citations, it should just show as "Yu et al. (2019)", and not as "Q. Yu et al. (2019). As far as I can tell, this problem only occurs for articles in which the last name of the first author is too short, i.e. consists of only two letters. If I change the last name of the first author to "Yun", the citation shows correctly. A quick and easy solution would be to remove the first name letter in the bibliography entry, but this results in an inconsistency in bibliography representation, with some authors having a first name and some having none. Does anyone know how to fix this?

moewe
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Victor Schouten
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    This is expected if you have several works where different Yus are the first author. See https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/citing-authors-same-surname. (See also https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/134535/35864) – moewe May 24 '21 at 13:36
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    I should say that this is expected specifically in APA style. If you don't want APA style, you may want to pick a different style, for example the vanilla style=authoryear,. – moewe May 24 '21 at 14:17

1 Answers1

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As the question linked by moewe shows, you could add uniquename=false to the options of biblatex:

\usepackage[style=apa,backend=biber,uniquename=false]{biblatex}

enter image description here

will become

enter image description here

with this code:

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{YuFangZhuMa2019,
author = {Yu, Q. and Fang, F. and Zhu, N. and Ma, S.},
title = {{A Matheuristic Approach to the Orienteering Problem with Service Time Dependent Profits}},
journal = {European Journal of Operations Research},
year = 2019,
volume = 273,
number = 2,
pages = {488-503},
doi = {10.1016/j.ejor.2018.08.007}
}

@article{YuFangZhuMa2020,
author = {Yu, F. and Fang, F. and Zhu, N. and Ma, S.},
title = {{A refutation.}},
journal = {European Journal of Operations Research},
year = 2020,
volume = 274,
number = 2,
pages = {488-503},
doi = {10.1016/j.ejor.2018.08.007}
}
\end{filecontents*}


\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[style=apa,backend=biber]{biblatex} 
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}


\begin{document}
\textcite{YuFangZhuMa2019} develop an exact polynomial-time algorithm with the use of the Karush-Kun-Tucker conditions.


\textcite{YuFangZhuMa2020} say this is codswallop.
\printbibliography
\end{document}
Kubo
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