Modifying a citation style in CSL editor on Mendeley

Question

I am currently using the built in citation style 'Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association' as it is the closest to the style that I need. However, the one issue I am having is when it comes to documents with the same first author and year, but different subsequent authors, shown below:

 I have a paper by (Elphick, Davies, et al. 2011) and (Elphick, Bergh, et 
 al. 2011).

 What I want is a paper by (Elphick et al. 2011a) and (Elphick et al. 
 2011b). 

I have a very rudimentary knowledge of computer programming, and have been able to work out some small issues I was having using the CSL editor. However, I have not been able to figure out how to resolve this issue. Is anyone able to help me with this? Thanks!

Answer 1

There are multiple ways in CSL 1.0.1 to disambiguate in-text cites that otherwise would look the same. Adding the year-suffixes is the measure of last resort (assuming it's turned on with the "disambiguate-add-year-suffix" attribute on the <citation> tag). In your case, you will want to disable the disambiguation method of adding names of additional persons. You can do this by removing the "disambiguate-add-names" from the same tag. "disambiguate-add-year-suffix" needs to be set to "true".

See http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/1.0.1/specification.html#disambiguation for documentation.

If you share your entire <citation> tag (with all the attributes and their values) here I can tell you whether you'd need to remove any other disambiguation attributes (the only other one is "disambiguate-add-givenname", but it doesn't look like that's active in your style)

Answer 2

For those still having issues despite the above, try manually going into the coding section (rather than the visual editor) and manually type disambiguate-add-names=false and this should hopefully resolve any issues if the visual editor isn't working properly. This solved my issue when using Mendeley.