Modifying et al

For the Harvard system I need to use the et al is done like this: (Lee, et al., 2009). The closest I have got with the style is (Lee , et al., 2009) How do I get rid of that space after the name?

The changes I made to get that far:

In the citation tags --> added a comma to the delimiter

<group delimiter=", ">
<text macro="author-short"/>
<text macro="year-date"/>
</group>

and terms --> added comma and full stop to string.

<terms>
<locale xml:lang="en">
<term name="et-al">, et al.</term>
</locale>
</terms>

That space needs to go, how do I do it?
  • I don't think you can or should hardcode the ", " into the et al.
    What happens if you take out the term definition of et al include into the names option of the author-short macro
    delimiter-precedes-last="always"
    that should put the comma there. Otherwise the extra space that you see is what you have in delimiter=" ": Zotero treats the et al. just like another author.
  • Thank you.
  • @adamsmith,

    That's interesting, I didn't know that it worked that way. Just for info, in the new processor & CSL 1.0 it will work slightly differently. delimiter-precedes-last will be applied only when an "and" join is requested, and an optional "et-al" element will be available in names for styling of the et al. string, and the comma can be added as a prefix on that element.
  • I discovered that yesterday...
    I think what you do with it in 1.0 makes perfect sense - as displayed by the fact that it would have been a lot more intuitive to Cozmo.
  • edited October 28, 2009
    Actually doing that didn't do anything, the comma didn't get put inbetween the et al and the name... it got put after the et al so I had (Lee et al.,, 2009).
  • sorry - that appears to just work with 2 or more authors (as in Lee, Meyer, et al. 2009)

    I don't have a good idea then.
  • Grr... they have put so much flexibility and I managed to find a locked character within 10 mins of finding this software...
  • well, as you can see above, the next csl version will accommodate this.
  • I would like to keep "et al." in lowercase even if the text-case is uppercase in the author macro. Is that possible ?
    I tried to modify the "et-al" term but failed. Can you help ?
  • Separate styling of the et-al term is not possible in the current CSL processor installed in Zotero, although this will become possible in a future version.
  • ok, thanks a lot for the swiftness of your reply !
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