Trouble adding "et al" parameters to downloaded style

jonhager
Hi all,

I'm very new to zotero and have been struggling to add the appropriate commands to dictate when "et al" is used in the bibliography. The downloaded style is for Physical Review Letters - here is the .csl file:

***********************************

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="in-text" version="1.0">
<info>
<title>Physical Review Letters</title>
<id>http://www.zotero.org/styles/physical-review-letters</id>;
<link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/american-physics-society" rel="independent-parent"/>
<author>
<name>Richard Karnesky</name>
<email>karnesky+zotero@gmail.com</email>
<uri>http://arc.nucapt.northwestern.edu/Richard_Karnesky</uri>;
</author>
<category field="physics"/>
<category citation-format="numeric"/>
<updated>2012-02-07T01:46:04+00:00</updated>
<summary>A style for APS's journal "Physical Review Letters"</summary>
<issn>0031-9007</issn>
<link href="http://authors.aps.org/STYLE/ms.html#citations" rel="documentation"/>
<rights>This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/</rights>;
</info>
</style>

*****************************
I know I need to be using et-al-min="3" et-al-use-first="1", but I can't seem to figure out how to incorporate them (when I add them I either crash the file or nothing changes with the bibliography).

Thanks in advance!
  • jonhager
    I followed the links to the actual file this was referencing and was able to make the appropriate modifications to get the citations changed. Just out of curiosity, is there a way to add the appropriate code directly to the code I posted above?
  • adamsmith
    Just out of curiosity, is there a way to add the appropriate code directly to the code I posted above?
    no, dependent styles like the one above are exact copies.
    If the et-al is supposed to be used for all APS styles, it can be added in the parent style (i.e. american-physics-society). If it's only for PRL, we need a new independent style for it (which would be a copy of APS which changed header and added et-al).

    Do you happen to know which is the case?
  • noksagt
    edited August 23, 2012
    It is NOT. The citation rule (given at the URL, above) states "et al." shortening should be used "only if length constrained and four or more authors". For non-length-constrained articles, they list all authors when the list includes "several authors (e.g., ten or fewer)".

    american-physics-society.csl should use:
    et-al-min="11" et-al-use-first="1"

    It seems to be up to author discretion to set et-al-min=4 (NOT THREE!), though perhaps it is a reasonable thing to do by default for the letter journals?
  • jonhager
    noksagt is correct (I thought it was 3 though, so I'll change that in my file - thanks!). Since you're limited to 4 pages you're allowed to use et al to save space, so the structure would have to be dynamic. Though, since they do a lot of formatting on their end it might be smarter to submit it as "11" and "1" and convert if the publisher requests it. It's easy enough to change if they request it now that I almost know what I'm doing :-)

    Thanks for the feedback!

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