Ask OASISNontraditional Sources: Works With the Same Author and Year
Last updated 5/6/2020
Visual: Screen opens to a background image with a person typing on a laptop and a notebook and pencil, along with the Walden University Writing Center logo. The title Walden University Writing Center and tagline “Your writing, grammar, and APA experts” appears on the screen. The screen changes to show the series title “Nontraditional Sources” and the video title “Works With the Same Author and Year.”
Audio: Guitar music
Visual: A slide appears with the title “Works With the Same Author and Year.” Underneath, there is a sample piece of a reference page. There are two sources listed:
Institute of Education Sciences. (2013a). Methodological resources. http://ies.ed.gov/funding/resources.axp
Institute of Education Sciences. (2013b). Peer review process. http://ies.ed.gov/director/sro/peer_review/index.axp
An arrow points the year in the first entry, (2013a), with a box attached saying “lower-case letters.”
Audio: You might find yourself in a situation where you’re citing multiple works with the same author and year. This can be common when you’re citing multiple pages from the same website or you’re referencing an author who has published multiple articles or books. In these cases where you have more than one source with the same author and year, you need to differentiate them in both the reference list and the corresponding citations, so the reader knows which source you’re referring to in which citation.
To create this differentiation, add lower-case letters to the publication year for the source. Let’s look at our example: Here we have the same author, the Institute of Education Sciences, and publication year, 2013. Note that the entries are ordered alphabetically by the titles, since the author and date are the same. To differentiate the sources, I’ve added “a” and “b” to the entries respectively. We only have two sources with the same author and year, so I’ve only used “a” and “b,” but if you had more sources, you’d continue to go down the alphabet.
Visual: A green box appears at the bottom of the same slide, with two example parenthetical citations inside. They read: (Institute of Education Sciences, 2013a) and (Institute of Education Sciences, 2013b).
Audio: Then to cite these sources, we’ll keep the lower-case letters we’ve added to the reference list in the citations, with 2013a and 2013b. By including these lower-case letters, our reader will know which entry in the reference list the citation corresponds with.
The last note about citing works with the same author and year is that you may have encountered these lower-case letter notations in your classroom, where your course resources often have the same author and year. In those cases, note that if you are citing those sources in your own writing, you’ll need to re-assign the lower-case letters, depending on how many of the sources with the same author and year you include in your writing; you won’t necessarily follow the same lower-case letter notations that the list of resources in your classroom has.
And that’s all you need to do to differentiate between sources with the same author and year!
Visual: The screen changes to an ending slide a background image with a person typing on a laptop and a notebook and pencil, along with the Walden University Writing Center logo. The email address writingsupport@mail.waldenu.edu appears on the screen.