BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Same authors, two papers, one year citations

[tammy]

Hi,

I am new to lyx and referencing and I hope someone can help.
I edit my references using Notepad and I have a windows based version of lyx, which I am writing my masters on.
I have two papers, written by the same authors in the same year. My reference in the text should look like this:

author and author, 2003a
author and author, 2003b

But when I extract the pdf of my work, the reference looks like this:

author and author, 003a

The program is taking the last four digits of the year category and I am losing the "2". How do I change this. I am using bib style apalike.

Many thanks

[kaiserkarl13]

I think I've figured out your problem, but without seeing your BibTeX database I won't know for sure. My guess is that you're entering your papers like this:

@article{author2003a,
author = "author and author",
year = "2003a"
}
@article{author2003b,
author = "author and author",
year = "2003b"
}

This causes problems because the year can only hold four digits (and it therefore cuts the first number off). The apalike style file figures out automatically that there should be an a and a b, so you don't have to list it explicitly. Use the following instead:

@article{author2003a,
author = "author and author",
year = 2003
}
@article{author2003b,
author = "author and author",
year = 2003
}

(putting in the title, pages, etc., of course). This should solve your problem.