The "Et-al" attribute of CSL "Names" element doesn't work in bibliography created by Zotero

yangming0 · April 23, 2017

Hello,
I'm writing a CSL file these days. After testing, I found that the CSL "Et-al" attribute of "Names" element doesn't work: prefix or suffix don't show at all in the bibliography created by Zotero. Does anyone knows how to solve this problem?
Thks a lot!

fbennett · April 23, 2017

Have you validated the style? Just in case:

https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki/Validation

yangming0 · April 23, 2017

Yes, it has passed the CSL Style and Locale Validator.

fbennett · April 23, 2017

I'd be happy to take a look at the code of the style. Can you paste it into https://gist.github.com, save it as a "gist", and post the URL of the saved page back here?

yangming0 · April 23, 2017

OK, thanks for your help! @fbennett
I have pushed it to github, at:
https://github.com/JunhuiJi/Chinese-Std-GB-T-7714-2005-numeric-Chinese/blob/master/chinese-std-gb-t-7714-2005-numeric-chinese-yet-another-implementation.csl

adamsmith · April 23, 2017

you're misunderstanding the element. The et-al element as a child of cs:names is only needed if you want to style how et al. appears (e.g. in italics, uppercase, etc.).
To actually use et al. in citations or the bibliography, you want to use et-al-min and et-al-use-first as attributes in both cs:citation and cs:bibliography (you can also set this as attributes of cs:names directly, but I wouldn't recommend doing that to be in line with conventions of style coding)

yangming0 · April 23, 2017

@adamsmith I have already set the et-al-min and et-al-use-first to 3, and that works. Anyway, thanks for your reply, and thanks for your explaination about the element Et-al.