Style Error: [Science Advances]

Gordana Panic
Hi there,

There appears to be a small but significant error in the Science Advances style guide: the instructions given by Science Advances is that the bibliography citation should contain the full list of authors- no "et al.".

Tried to fix this myself by opening in Notepad and changed the minimum number for et al., but unfortunately the code doesn't seem to open in Notepad.

Thanks,

Gordana
  • poettli
    edited July 2, 2019
    Deleted
  • damnation
    edited July 2, 2019
    @adamsmith
    science-advances is just a dependent of science.csl.
    In both their guidelines they specify to use all authors (see https://www.sciencemag.org/authors/instructions-preparing-initial-manuscript and link above for advances).
    Adapt style?

    (funny enough they give examples with et al. for preprint articles at the very bottom.)
  • Gordana Panic
    @damnation
    Indeed, they require to use all authors. I tried to see if I can adapt the style, but when I open up the csl code, it doesn't actually seem to say much. (The code is also found here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/dependent/science-advances.csl)

    Or is there a more user friendly way to change it?

    Many thanks, by the way to all the people who replied so quickly :-)
  • damnation
    I'll make the change once adamsmith confirms to go ahead with this.
    It is better if we change the style for every user than just you. There is dozens of submissions to these journals every week, so it should be correct for everybody. But it needs to make sense and actually correct.
  • adamsmith
    Yes, I think I've said so elsewhere, too. We should just remove et al.
  • bwiernik
    @damnation relevant discussion here https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/issues/3881
  • Gordana Panic
    @damnation I agree, the style change would be most useful if made for everybody.

    @bwiernik Thank you for that link.

    I've been following a few of the forum debates on this topic. The uncertainty of whether to remove "et al." seems to be founded on the idea that the Science Advances citation style is identical to that of Science, which appears to have different rules for its HTML and PDF versions. However, the actual Science Advances articles don't appear to use "et. al", not even in the PDF versions.

    Shall we just contact Science Advances directly and clarify the matter? Or is it a bit naive to think they'll reply on this matter?
  • bwiernik
    No, we should just remove et al from the Science styles.
  • steff1088
    Hi, this still seems to be wrong and et al. is still being used as Science Advances style. I am also having problems to modify this manually.. Can this be changed please? I am not sure why it would take years to just make this correction.
  • adamsmith
    Science (and Science Advances) don't use et al. The change was made within a week of this discussion.
    Which reference manager are you using, how are you testing this?
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