In-text citation with biblatex-apa not using et al. correctly? Two authors listed before et al

Question

I'm writing my thesis, and have had the strangest behavior from just one in-text citation. I'm using biblatex/biber with the following setup:

documentclass[letterpaper, 11pt, twoside, openright]{book}
usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
usepackage[american]{babel}
usepackage{csquotes}
usepackage[style=apa, 
            language=american, 
            backend=biber, 
            natbib=true, 
            hyperref=true, 
            uniquelist=true]{biblatex}
DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
addbibresource{Bibliography.bib}

I had been using bibtex/natbib earlier, hence the natbib=true, but swapped out all the citep and citet references for parencite and textcite.

The issue is with this entry:

@article{nowak2014,
    title={Tree and forest effects on air quality and human health in the {United States}},
    author={Nowak, David J. and Hirabayashi, Satoshi and Bodine, Allison and Greenfield, Eric},
    journaltitle={Environmental Pollution},
    volume={193},
    pages={119--129},
    year={2014},
    publisher={Elsevier}
}

This is the only work I have for Nowak in 2014. As you can see it has five authors, so, according to my best understanding of APA style, the first reference should list all authors and subsequent references should just list (Nowak, et al., 2014) or Nowak, et al. (2014).

But that is not what I get:

parencite{nowak2014} yields (Nowak, Hirabayashi, Bodine, & Greenfield, 2014), but then

parencite{nowak2014} subsequently yields (Nowak, Hirabayashi, et al., 2014), and

textcite{nowak2014} yields Nowak, Hirabayashi, et al. (2014)

According to all the APA references I can find (for example), this is not the correct behavior. Is there something wrong with my setup or with my understanding of APA? All my references work correctly except this one. What's different?

cfr · Answer

The code you've posted, made into an MWE, does not produce the issue you are describing.

documentclass[letterpaper, 11pt, twoside, openright]{book}
usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
usepackage[american]{babel}
usepackage{csquotes}
usepackage[style=apa,
            language=american,
            backend=biber,
            natbib=true,
            hyperref=true,
            uniquelist=true]{biblatex}
DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
begin{filecontents}{jobname.bib}
@article{nowak2014,
    title={Tree and forest effects on air quality and human health in the {United States}},
    author={Nowak, David J. and Hirabayashi, Satoshi and Bodine, Allison and Greenfield, Eric},
    journaltitle={Environmental Pollution},
    volume={193},
    pages={119--129},
    year={2014},
    publisher={Elsevier}
}
end{filecontents}
addbibresource{jobname.bib}

begin{document}
parencite{nowak2014}

parencite{nowak2014}

textcite{nowak2014}

end{document}

I am guessing that you have another entry where the first author is Nowak, the year is 2014 and there are other author(s). If so, uniquelist=true is responsible for the behaviour as it causes biblatex to ensure that labels uniquely identify bibliography entries. Without that, it would not be clear which Nowak et al. (2014) you had in mind. (Did you mean Nowak, Smith and Jones (2014) or did you mean Nowak, Hook and Waverly (2014)?)

However, without a proper example i.e. code we can use to reproduce the problem you are seeing, this must remain no more than a guess.

Roger · Answer

I encountered exactly the same problem. But in my case there were two entries for the same first author and the same year in my .bib file. One was labelled Huang2014 (i.e. @article{Huang2014,), and the other Huang2014a. Both had '2014' for the year. When I changed the year entry for the second one to '2014a' (i.e. year = {2014a}) it fixed the problem.

Answered by Roger on July 4, 2021

teichert · Answer

If you only need the citation author list to be unique within the same year, then you want uniquelist=minyear:

Disambiguate the labelname list only if the truncated list is identical to another one with the same labelyear. This mode of operation is useful for author-year styles and requires labeldateparts=true.

In-text citation with biblatex-apa not using et al. correctly? Two authors listed before et al

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