Citing multiple publications by same author in same year in RMarkdown

Question

I have two citations by the same author, and they were published in the same year.

Right now, my code looks like this

blah blah Hansen [-@Hansen2015a; -@Hansen2015b]

and I get this

blah blah Author (2015; 2015) blah blah

I want the result to look like this

blah blah Author (2015a, 2015b) blah blah

In my case, I want to cite both publications in the same sentence, but I also want to know how to achieve this lettering if I were to cite these publications in different sentences.

I tried editing the year in the BibTeX citation entry to manually insert the a and b, but that results in this

blah blah Author (n.d.; n.d.) blah blah

Answer 1

Hi mdawgig and welcome to Stack Overflow!
Here are two examples of what the entries (same author, same year) in BibTeX file (.bib) might look like:

@article{Author_2015a,
    Author = {Author, A. and Another, B.},
    Journal = {Amazing Journal},
    Pages = {50-100},
    Title = {A New Paper},
    Volume = {5},
    Year = {2015}
}

@article{Author_2015b,
    Author = {Author, A. and Another, C.},
    Journal = {Another Amazing Journal},
    Pages = {100-150},
    Title = {Another New Paper},
    Volume = {7},
    Year = {2015}
}

In R Markdown document, a line like this:

# using minus ( - ) sign before the @ will suppress author's name  
blah blah Author [-@Author_2015a; -@Author_2015b] blah blah

should return desired result (citing both publications in the same sentence):

blah blah Author (2015a, 2015b) blah blah

I also want to know how to achieve this lettering if I were to cite these publications in different sentences.

There are many R Markdown resources out there. You may find some of these useful (Bibliographies and Citations, Bibliographies, Bibliographies and citations, Citations).

Let us know if this answer your question.