Use of et al. in bibliographies

shjenkins

I have some records in my Zotero database for which I don't want to include all authors' names. For example, this might be a paper in a scientific journal with tens or even hundreds of authors. So I might like to list the first 10 authors (or the first 3, or whatever the number might be) in my Zotero record, then use et al. to stand for the remaining authors. When I do this using the Ecology style, for example, I get this in my bibliography:

Bartel, R. A., K. S. Oberhauser, J. C. de Roode, S. M. Altizer, and et al. 2011. Monarch butterfly migration and parasite transmission in eastern North America. Ecology 92:342–351.

I want to eliminate the "and" in the list of authors names, but don't see how to do this using the CSL editor. I could substitute "others" for et al. in my database record, but this wouldn't quite serve the purpose, because I want the bibliography to show "et al.", not "and others" (nor the redundant "and et al.")

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Steve Jenkins

bwiernik

This is controlled by the style you use. What style do you want?

adamsmith

Ecology, e.g., never uses et al. But many other styles do. You'd not find it hard to find a style that uses et al. after 6, 10, or 20 authors. But don't delete authors from your Zotero entries -- that's a bad idea.

shjenkins

I appreciate your advice and I respect your bibliographic purism. Indeed, as a writer, reviewer, and editor of technical papers in science journals, I espoused bibliographic purism myself (sometimes to the dismay of some of my graduate students). However, having been retired for 6 years, I now write about science for a general audience; e.g., in Tools for critical thinking in biology published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and in a blog on critical thinking at https://critical-thinking.blogs.unr.edu/. With that in mind, I don't really need to keep track in my Zotero database of the names of all authors that I might cite in a blog post (e.g., a recent paper in Nature on epigenetics had 107 authors).

It was relatively easy to modify bibliographic styles in EndNote (one of the few advantages of EndNote, with its proprietary styles, over Zotero), although I also appreciate the advantages of a general, open-source style system like CSL. I guess simply need to learn how to work with CSL styles, and to that end will search for manuals and tutorials.

Steve Jenkins

adamsmith

this isn't about purism as much as what works.
CSL is simply not designed to work with manually entered "et al." in the author list and it's going to be quite hard to modify CSL styles to have that look right.
It's up to you, but as someone who knows how to edit CSL styles, I'd really recommend just leaving the data alone and (_especially_ if you're not stuck with one specific style but can pick whatever you like) just find one that handles et al. in a way you like.

adamsmith

Though FWIW, you can remove the "and" be setting and from "text" to an empty field in the editor (in code terms, deleting and="text"). But that may cause other problems.

fbennett

@adamsmith, @rintze and others may groan a bit to hear me say this, but there is a hack in the citation processor for this exact use case. If you enter "et al." after the given name of the last author in the record (with a period), it will render more or less correctly.

From my more ambitious days, when every workaround looked like an opportunity. :-)

Edit: With the workaround, you can include a good run of author names (20, say), and when the list is truncated by a style, things still come out looking about right. The only gotcha is with scientific styles that show the last-listed author (the Principal Investigator) preceded by an ellipsis.

shjenkins

Thanks for this suggestion (I wish I had thought of it myself). This hack produces at least one problem -- it adds a new author's name to the SQLite database, e.g.

Jenkins, S. H., et al.

as the terminal author to be named followed by other, un-named authors, is the same as

Jenkins, S. H.

as a sole author or one of a group of authors, all to be named.

Both of these would show up in a search for Jenkins, S. H., so maybe this isn't too big a problem. More problematic would be if Jenkins, S. H. were used in some records (such as technical journal articles) and Jenkins, Steve were used in others (such as blog postings). I guess this is one reason why it's best to use full author names if available; the citation styles take care of converting to initials.

Steve Jenkins