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I am using the apacite package to write my thesis. I've noticed that when I only have 1 author as a reference, it also prints the first name. According to the APA guidelines this should not be the case. Does anyone know why it's happening?

MWE:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
\begin{document}  

According to \citet{Oxfam} ...

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{bib}
\end{document}

bib.bib

@misc{Oxfam,
author = "{Jon Slater}",
title = "Annual income of richest 100 people enough to end global poverty four times over",
year = "2013",
howpublished = "{\url{https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2013-01-19/annual-income-richest-100-people-enough-end-global-poverty-four}}"
note = {Accessed: 2018-09-17}

Text output:

According to Jon Slater (2013),

moewe
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user3801533
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    Do not use curly braces and quotation marks (or double curly braces for that matter) for a field: Use either author = "Jon Slater", or author = {Jon Slater},. If you use author = "{Jon Slater}", Jon Slater will be treated as a unit (as a person with the family name "Jon Slater" and no first name). – moewe Nov 06 '18 at 08:13
  • Wow I did not know that. My bad :) It's working now. Thanks!! – user3801533 Nov 06 '18 at 08:19

1 Answers1

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Write either

author = {Jon Slater},

or

author = "Jon Slater",

If you use both quotation marks and curly braces as in

author = "{Jon Slater}",

the author is not a person with first name Jon and last name Slater, instead BibTeX will parse the name as one unit, i.e. as someone whose last name is Jon Slater and who has no first name. This is very convenient for corporate authors (see Using a 'corporate author' in the "author" field of a bibliographic entry (spelling out the name in full)), but (almost) never what you want for people's names.

In none-name fields the construction

<field> = "{<contents>}",

does not mess up name parsing, but might completely inhibit the sentence case feature. Read more about it at BibTeX loses capitals when creating .bbl file. I strongly suggest not using a style that applies sentence case if you don't want sentence case instead of wrapping the entire contents of a field in braces.

In the example howpublished does not really gain a lot from "{...}", "..." or {...} would be enough.

moewe
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