Author Names
Every CitationLab post tagged author names. This topic runs through several posts across the blog — case files where it caused a real problem, and guides for handling it in your own reference list.
'Nelson SD, W.' — anatomy of a mangled author
Vancouver author lists read under APA grammar produce names no human has. How 'Nelson SD, Wong PT' becomes 'Nelson SD, W.', why a wrong parse is worse than no parse, and when a checker should refuse to guess.
Et al. done right
How many authors et al. may stand in for, when it may first appear, and whether the reference list may use it at all are decided by your style. What the rules are, and why the abbreviation is the most information-destroying thing you can do to a citation.
One author, two spellings, zero matches
A surname spelled two ways — a hyphen, a diacritic, a caps style — can make a citation checker report a missing reference and an orphan that are the same person. How name matching should actually work.
Orphan references: entries you never cite
A reference listed but never cited. Where orphans come from, why the heading on your list decides whether they are errors at all, and why a large share of them are not orphans but matching failures.
The bare-year bug
A trailing '(2020)' after a shared-author citation is a real citation of a second paper — or a phantom, depending on how it's read. Anatomy of the bare-year defect class and the rule that resolves it.
When a university becomes an author
A reference whose 'author' is a department: how affiliations leak into the author slot, why blanket rules break real corporate authors like WHO, and how registry evidence repairs the entry — with your approval.