I am writing a doctoral thesis and I am using APAcite to set the references in APA (American Psychological Association) format. Mostly this has worked perfectly fine, but I would like to suppress the author initials from the compiled version (in-text, not in the end references section). This happens because there are multiple authors with the same name e.g.,
Smith and Jones (1992) or Wells and Smith (1901)
are typeset in-text as:
I. Smith and Jones (1992) or Wells and D. Smith (1901).
Although it may be correct to have the initial in-text in APA format, in reality I am using BPS (British Psychological Society) format, which uses an adapted APA format (and you guessed it, they don't like the initial in text). Thus in-text should look like the first example above (without initial) but looks like the second (with).
To clarify: Any ideas on how to suppress the initial in-text in apacite?
Thanks.
ps. I understand that I could do it with a different bibtex style, but my question pertains to apacite.
Best Answer
Make a copy of
apacite.bst
(perhaps name itbpacite.bst
). If you are using TeXLive it is located in/usr/local/texlive/<year>/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/apacite/apacite.bst
where<year>
is the current year of your TeX Live distribution. The easiest way to find the exact file on any system is to typekpsewhich apacite.bst
in a terminal window. Save the new copy in your localtexmf/bibtex/bst
folder.In the new file, comment out (or delete) lines 753-775.
I won't quote the whole code here, but the relevant function in the
.bst
file begins:So after you have commented out the code, you should have what is effectively a function that does nothing. (You can't delete the function itself without messing with more parts of the code.)
This removes the extra check for whether initials are needed; since the default citation is not to have them, they will not appear in any citation.
Here's a test document assuming the modified
.bst
file: