Different authors with same surname? Disambiguation problem

[yojimbo]

I'm sure this must be a common issue with large manuscripts with 100s of citations.

I'm using (author date) format (though actually a custom citation format).

I have a number of publications that are written by different authors, who have the same surname, writing in the same year.

BE disambiguates them by appending a letter after the year
ie Kim 1997a, Kim 1997b, Kim 1997c

Is this correct according to style guides? (I haven't admittedly seen these circumstances described in any style guide)

To me, it looks wrong, because it looks like three articles written by the same person.

ie the wrong field is being disambiguated here, it's not the year that needs disambiguating, it's the name.

I'd like, in these cases, for them to disambiguated with an initial. ie:

ie Kim J 1997, Kim W 1997, Kim S 1997

Is this an "option" that could be added to BE?

In the meantime, is there a way I could fake this behaviour? I thought about entering the citations manually, suppressing them with {!

But then they'd still be listed in the biblio with the letters appended to the year, which, IMO, isn't accurate.

I don't want to use "Add initials/names/short title to citation until unique" because that doesn't fit the template I've been told to cite in, and I do also have lots of citations with the same author in the same year, where I do want a letter after the year instead of a short title.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome.

[Jon]

But it seems "Add initials/names/short title to citation until unique" will do this for you -- it will add initials to disambiguate names, which is the example you gave. There is now way to mix the two (add initials if the full names differ, add a letter to the year if the full names and the year are the same but the publications differ).

Jon
Sonny Software