can't remove "et al." from in-text citation

gzegels1
Hi all,

I'm trying to modify the Vancouver style to our internal standards. I'm almost there but IU can't remove the "et al." from the in-text citationa. I used the visual editor, and there it is fine, but when I use the style file in Zotero, it always pops up again.

Any ideas?

thanks!

kind regards
  • damnation
    Vancouver, as a numeric style, wouldn't and doesn't have any et al.

    Can you share your style via pastebin.com and show us what you actually are working with?
  • gzegels1
    Hi,

    I pasted the code here: https://pastebin.com/wqke50wA

    Well, for some reason I still don't get, we are using a mix of several styles, which was fine as we did it manually. I try to implement reference managemant software, but hence need to adapt the style to mimic our current standard as much as possible. One of the change is to use (author year) intext citation, instead of the numerical. I'm not very familiar with coding, so used the visual editor (and hence the code might look a bit messy). But the intext citation works wel in the examples in the visual editor, including the disambiguation, but when I use it with Zotero, the "et al." always pops up. I tried to remove it from different lines, but I can't find the issue.

    thanks for following up

    kind regards
  • damnation
    First of all, using https://validator.citationstyles.org/, you can identify and remove some errors:
    Line 26: "textual" is not a valid option here. You'll want "author-date"
    Line 114: just delete that whole line. You're not allowed to have uncalled macros. (it would still work, but will throw an error for your users when installing your style)

    Re your "et al." question, delete all of this in line 306:
    et-al-min="0" et-al-use-first="0" et-al-subsequent-min="0" et-al-subsequent-use-first="0"
  • gzegels1
    thanks, didn't know about the validator, but it's very handy!

    deleting line 306 didn't solve it; in the examples in the editor there is no "et al", but when I use it in Zotero, the et al appears again. I also tried deleting row 350 (now 349 after deletion line 114), but then it adds all the names of the authors; I tried to play around with the figures, in row 350 but I don't find the correct combination it seems.
  • damnation
    edited August 28, 2023
    Ah, now I see where this stems from.
    Delete all instances of et-al-min="1" et-al-use-first="1" et-al-subsequent-min="1" et-al-subsequent-use-first="1" throughout your code.

    Generally, what is the output you want to have for the in-text portion?
    It's a bit messy at the moment. ;)
  • gzegels1
    :) I think "messy" is an understatement, or even a euphemism. The format I'm aiming at is (author date), with disambiguation by given name, year, year suffix. The disambiguation works well, it's just the " et al."

    I get an error if I remove those other instances.

    Well maybe they just need to learn to live with it, or at least pay someone who know what he's doing :)

    thanks for the support!

    kind regards
  • damnation
    edited August 28, 2023
    Well, with the above, plus an additional comma set on names > name delimiter it looks like this for me.
    vancouver-author-date
  • adamsmith
    edited August 28, 2023
    Is the goal to just have first author without et al for author groups? I think you can do that by defining et al as an empty term.
  • gzegels1
    edited August 29, 2023
    yes, idd. Just the first author and the date without a "," between them. So, eg,

    full reference:
    Barst RJ, Ivy DD, Gaitan G, Szatmari A, Rudzinski A, Garcia AE, et al. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-ranging study of oral sildenafil citrate in treatment-naive children with pulmonary arterial hypertension. Circulation. 2012;125(2):324–34.

    what I see in the visual editor when I upload the example above:
    (Barst 2012)
    This is the format I need

    What I see when I add it to Word using Zotero:
    (Barst et al. 2012)

    How do you define something as empty term?
  • damnation
    edited August 30, 2023
    You would add this to the terms in the locale section of your style. (note you have several for several different languages)

    <term name="et-al"></term></locale>
  • gzegels1
    Thanks, but wouldn’t this also remove the “et al.” from the bibliography?
  • adamsmith
    Oh, if you want it in the bib it's a bit more complicated. basically you'd have to set the term for and others to empty and set the in text citation to use that instead of et al. (using <et-al term="and others"/> under names in author-short
  • gzegels1
    Yes, that did it! Thanks both for the quick feedback! Much appreciated!
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