commas in between two authors' names

jessicawinter

I'm citing a report by two corporate authors, so each author has a company name, not a personal name. I'm using American Political Science Association style. In the bibliography, I'm getting a comma in between the names: for example

"Pepsi, and Coke. 2019. Title of Report..."

I don't want the comma. Is there anything I'm doing wrong? Should I be putting both authors into a single author field in this case? Does it make a difference that these are company names rather than personal names? "Smith, Alice, and Jane Doe" doesn't look quite as silly as "Pepsi, and Coke".

thanks!

bwiernik

This is the behavior called for by the style guide. It simply says to separate all author names by a comma. It makes no exception for sources with only two authors (either personal or organizational).

To change this, edit the CSL style and change the ‘delimiter-precedes-last’ argument in the style to “contextual”.

jessicawinter

thank you

adamsmith

bwiernik and I have had this argument before -- I'm not convinced he's correct about this, especially not for APSA style.

The comma between two names is indeed used to set off the first name of the first author in Chicago style, on which APSA style is based. They don't have an example with two organizations (nor does the APSA style manual), but here is how Chicago describes/justifies this comma in citations:

In a bibliography, only the first author’s name is inverted, and a comma must appear both before and after the first author’s given name or initials.

I.e. the presence of a first name is the key factor here.

Especially Chicago style does not like ungrammatical constructions like "Pepsi, and Coke" and I find it highly implausible that they would endorse it.

Unfortunately CSL can't quite deal with this situation. We have the "after-inverted-name" value of the delimiter-precedes-last attribute http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#name which was introduced to handle this requirement, but we didn't quite think it through at the time, unfortunately: It doesn't work for styles that _also_ require a serial comma before and for all enumerations of 3+ items.

bwiernik

(You have a better memory than I on discussing this before. ;-p)

I definitely think it’s plausible that ASPA would want no comma. @adamsmith CSL should probably consider adding the missing format in 1.2 (does any style actually want the current behavior?).

adamsmith

(does any style actually want the current behavior?)

Styles that never use "and/&" and always delimit authors with commas (like Vancouver, e.g.) do, yes, so we probably need both.

The above example is a pretty marginal case, imo, but also probably doesn't require a lot of tweaking of the schema, so yes, I think we should definitely consider it for 1.2