Truncating author lists *except* on publications by certain authors

ARHamilton

Hi,
For a grant proposal written in Word with very limited space, I'd like to truncate author lists to a few names *except* if the paper was by one of the applicants. Is there any way to do this?

e.g.
Author1 et al, "this is an obvious result", J. Noninteresting Results 1, 2076 (2018)
Author2, Author 3, Applicant1, Author 4, Author 5, "this is a breakthrough result", J. Interesting Results 1, 2076 (2018)

Is there a way to do this other than manually editing the Bilbliography in Word just before the proposal is converted to PDF? Grateful for any suggestions.

bwiernik

You could modify the style you are using to use a type of creator other than `author` for these references. So for example, you could enter the authors in Extra like this:
Original author: Last || First A.
Original author: Last || First B.

And so on. Then, edit your citation style to test for `original-author` are print it with no et-al I’d present and to print `author` with et-al otherwise.

ARHamilton

Thanks. So in the csl file I need to test for an entry in the Extra field somehow, and then use a different author macro?

If I have to test for entries in the Extra field anyway, it possible to do everything in the csl file, by testing if the author field contains a given name hard-coded into the csl file?

I'd be grateful for specifics as I've no idea how to code in xml. Many thanks.

adamsmith

You wouldn't test for extra but for original-author in CSL. You can't test for the content of a variable (only its presence). What bwiernik suggests is certainly possible, but it's fairly elaborate CSL writing _and_ requires separate data entry for items used in grant proposals -- unless you have hundreds of citations in your grant proposals, I would doubt this is an efficient use of time.

Instead, I would simply generate the reference list with et al. and then swap out the references that include applicants using quick copy and a non-et al. version of the same style.

Alternatively, you could use a version of the style that prints all authors and manually shorten all non-applicant citations.