A Convention for Disambiguating Citations

In this essay I am going to refer to several sources which all have the same author (Melanie Rimmer) and year (2021) and therefore all have the same citation. The first source I will cite is a journal article. Melanie Rimmer did not in fact publish any journal articles in 2021 so this is a fictional article for the purpose of this essay, which itself is a fictional essay for the purpose of a blog post. Because this is the first source by Rimmer in 2021 mentioned in this article, I will add a letter “a” to the end of the citation to distinguish it from the other sources with the same citation, like this (Rimmer, 2021a). If I refer to the same journal article again later in the essay, it will still be referred to as (Rimmer, 2021a). I don’t just increment the letter each time I include any citation by Rimmer in 2021. The citation (Rimmer, 2021a) will always refer to the same journal article in this essay¹.

The second source by Rimmer mentioned in this essay is a book she wrote. This also is fictional. It’s my essay so if I want to pretend I published in Nature, gave my inaugural speech as president of the US, and was nominated Time magazine’s person of the year, I will. In any case, because it is the second source mentioned in this essay, I will give it the letter “b” i.e. (Rimmer, 2021b). Any additional sources by Rimmer in 2021 will have letters appended to them in the order they are first mentioned in the essay.

When I write my References list, I will add the letters a, b, c etc. to the references which match the citations in the essay. By doing this, there is no ambiguity about which citation matches to which reference, even though several of the sources have the same author and year. Without the disambiguating letters, it would be impossible to know which source is being referred to.

In conclusion, the convention of adding disambiguating letters to citations which share the same author and year helps avoid confusion. In this essay I have explained how you can use it in your own essays.

¹If I later write a completely different essay which also refers to several different sources by Melanie Rimmer in 2021, the journal article might be mentioned second or third etc, in which case it would have the letter “b” or “c” in that article. In this current essay, though, the journal article was mentioned first so it always has the letter “a” appended.

(434 words)

References

Rimmer, M., 2021a. “Please clap”: Challenging Cultural Epistemology in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. British Journal of Social Psychology, 60(2), pp.610-634.

Rimmer, M., 2021b. Prefacing Philosophical Feminism in Minecraft. SAGE Publications Limited.