BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ duplicated surnames and bibtex

[noahpoah]

I'm using the apacite package and the bibliographystyle is apacitex, and I want to cite a paper with first author George Miller, but I've already got a bunch of citations to papers with the first author Joanne L. Miller. Without the G. Miller citation, everything is fine, but with it, the .bbl file gets screwed up. I think I've figured out where the problem is, but I don't know how to fix it. When only J. L. Miller is cited, the beginning of her entries in the .bbl file look like

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\bibitem[\protect\citeauthoryear{%
Miller%
...

whereas, when I also cite George Miller, they look like

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\bibitem[\protect\citeauthoryear{%
J.~L. Miller%
...

George Miller's look similar, but with G.~A. instead of J.~L. Texshop gives me the following error when I try to typeset the document:

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Underfull \vbox (badness 10000) has occurred while \output is active [1]
! Undefined control sequence.
<argument> J.\nonbreakingspaceL. Miller\AX {miller jl @Miller, J.\nonbreaki...
l.74 ...oiceless categories \cite<>[]{Mil89,Vol92}

Any thoughts on how to deal with this? I can get by without the George Miller citation if I have to, but it would be good to include it, and it's irritating that I can't cite it just because someone else I cite has the same last name and a different first name.

[frabjous]

The problem with the undefined control sequence is that it has "\nonbreakingspaceL" rather than "\nonbreakingspace L", or so it would seem.

Can you post the relevant entries from your .bib file?

[noahpoah]

Here it is:

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@article{Mil89,
	Author = {Joanne L. Miller and Lydia E. Volaitis},
	Date-Modified = {2008-08-20 11:11:09 -0400},
	Journal = {Perception \& Psychophysics},
	Keywords = {categorization phonetics speech perception},
	Number = {6},
	Pages = {505-512},
	Title = {Effect of speaking rate on the perceptual structure of a phonetic category},
	Volume = {46},
	Year = {1989}}

Since my first post, I've found that if I manually delete the J.~L. and G.~A. from the .bbl file, it typesets okay. I assume this means that Bibtex is putting these in but that Texshop can't interpret them?

[noahpoah]

Sorry, here's the other one:

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@article{Mil55,
	Author = {Miller, George A. and Nicely, Patricia E.},
	Date-Added = {2009-08-11 12:05:44 -0400},
	Date-Modified = {2009-08-11 12:07:11 -0400},
	Journal = {Journal of the Acoustical Society of America},
	Keywords = {phonetics perception speech},
	Number = {2},
	Pages = {338-352},
	Title = {An analysis of perceptual confusions among some English consonants},
	Volume = {27},
	Year = {1955}}

[frabjous]

TeXshop doesn't "interpret" anything; it's just a front-end for your LaTeX system. The problem would probably either with your BibTeX version, one of the packages, or your bibliography style file. I don't know enough to know.

One thing you might try as a workaround, however, is placing their initials in braces in the .bib file to keep them from running together with \nonbreakingspace:

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@article{Mil55,
Author = {Miller, {G}eorge {A}. and Nicely, {P}atricia {E}.},
Date-Added = {2009-08-11 12:05:44 -0400},
Date-Modified = {2009-08-11 12:07:11 -0400},
Journal = {Journal of the Acoustical Society of America},
Keywords = {phonetics perception speech},
Number = {2},
Pages = {338-352},
Title = {An analysis of perceptual confusions among some English consonants},
Volume = {27},
Year = {1955}}

@article{Mil89,
Author = {{J}oanne {L}. Miller and {L}ydia {E}. Volaitis},
Date-Modified = {2008-08-20 11:11:09 -0400},
Journal = {Perception \& Psychophysics},
Keywords = {categorization phonetics speech perception},
Number = {6},
Pages = {505-512},
Title = {Effect of speaking rate on the perceptual structure of a phonetic category},
Volume = {46},
Year = {1989}}

[noahpoah]

The braces don't help, so I don't think it's actually running things together. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

[derwiszck]

This post is related to the same errors.

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Overfull \vbox (260.242pt too high) has occurred while \output is active
[22]
Underfull \vbox (badness 10000) detected at line 484
[23] [24]
Underfull \vbox (badness 10000) detected at line 585
[25] (./SI_final.bbl [26] [27]) [28] (./SI_final.aux)

I had the same problem. In my case it comes from the soft link that I used in the directory to point out to the bib file in the different directory.

I have no idea why it generate the similar errors but when I deleted the soft link and simple copy the bib file everything works fine!