Adding “et al.” in natbib with five authors if the citation has more than five authors

bibliographiescitingnatbib

In our publishment regulations, there is an instruction for citations as follows:

All authors should be included in reference lists unless there are 6 or more, in which case only the first 5 should be given,
followed by et al. (not italicized)

I currently have a citation with 6 authors (with lastnames A, B, C, D, E, F). By using natbib & chicago as bibliography style (it's also the same with plainnat), when I cite it with citet*{paper1}, I get the following output:

"... methodology A, B, C, D, and F [26]. As ..."

which is close but not exactly what the instruction wants.

Expected output is:

"... methodology A, B, C, D, and E et al. [26]. As ..."

There are two problems here,

It includes F (last author's surname) where the instruction dictates E to be used. Here, we need to explicitly put a cut-off on the 5th author, and printing 5th last-name as the last one in citation.
There is no "et al." in the citation.

For the 2nd problem I can just put "et al." afterwards basically, this's a sort of work around I think of, which would yield the following,

"... methodology A, B, C, D, and F [26] et al. As ...", which would be kind of ugly.

For the 1st problem, I am not sure about how the authors should be in order for this, any suggestion for that is also appreciated.

If there are bibliography styles (afaik there is not by searching a while) supports this automatically or with a little modification, it would be great.

Best Answer

Thanks for clarifying that the formatting requirement pertains to both the formatted items in the bibliography and to citation call-outs.

I suggest you proceed as follows:

Make a copy of your main bib file; if the bib file's name is (say), references.bib, call the copy something like references-trunc5.bib.
Open the file references-trunc5.bib in an editor; the program you use to create and edit tex files will do fine.
Hopefully, the bib file doesn't contain too many entries with more than 5 authors (or editors). Find these entries and replace name6 and beyond with and others. E.g., change
```
author = "A and B and C and D and E and F and G and H and I and J and K"
```
to
```
author = "A and B and C and D and E and others"
```
Importantly, do not change anything else about the bib entries in question. In particular, don't change the citation "keys" of the entries.
Save the bib file in a directory that's searched by BibTeX.

In the main tex file, change the instruction

\bibliography{references}

\bibliography{references-trunc5}

Finally, perform a complete recompile cycle -- LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more -- to fully propagate the changes.

Two final comments:

Unless you have a very good reason to use \citet*, I think you're better off using \citet.
Things would be even easier if you could use biblatex, as you wouldn't have to change the bib file. All you'd have to do is set the option maxnames=5.

A full MWE (minimum working example) and its output:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{references-trunc5.bib}
@misc{abcdefghijk, 
      author = "A and B and C and D and E and others", 
      title  = "Thoughts", 
      year = 3001
     }
\end{filecontents}

\usepackage[authoryear, round]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat} % or some other suitable bib style

\begin{document}
\noindent
\citet*{abcdefghijk}. \citet{abcdefghijk}.
\bibliography{references-trunc5}
\end{document}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Citation alias with multibib and natbib

Of course whatever other solution different from the alias system is absolutely welcomed.

As often I recommend biblatex. However the solution below doesn't use biblatex.

Your example has some errors listed below.

Errors related to multibib

If you define a new bibliography with \newcites{<ext>}{<headind>}, the new commands \bibliographystyle<ext>, \bibliography<ext> and \cite<ext> will be defined. So in your case the line
```
\newcites{sec}{Other bibliographic references}
```
leads to the commands:
```
\bibliographystylesec
\bibliographysec
```
and a new file <ext>.aux will be created. This new file needs his own bibtex run.

Errors related to your bibliography style plainnat

your style writes the following lines to your included bbl file (included by \bibliography).

\newcommand{\noopsort}[1]{}
\newcommand{\printfirst}[2]{#1}
\newcommand{\singleletter}[1]{#1}
\newcommand{\switchargs}[2]{#2#1}

You want to have two bibliographies and so the definition of the commands are done twice. This occurs to the error that the commands are defined. One approach would be to set the commands undefined before including the second bibliography.

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{xampl}

\let\noopsort\undefined
\let\printfirst\undefined
\let\singleletter\undefined
\let\switchargs\undefined

\bibliographystylesec{plainnat}
\bibliographysec{xampl}

the style plainnat is a numerical citation style. The manual of natbib provides the following information
By default, natbib is in author–year mode. This can be changed by
1. selecting a numerical bibliography style with predefined citation style, defined either in the package or in the local configuration file;

Errors related to natbib's \defcitealias

the command \defcitealias is described in the documentation with the following sentence:

Sometimes one wants to refer to a reference with a special designation, rather than by the authors
that means your key of \defcitealias must be a given entry of you bib file. You doesn't show us your bib file so I used the file xampl.bib which is located in your texmf tree.
the command \defcitealias makes no differences between the different bibliographies, so you can use it as described in the documentation.
multibib defines the command \citep<ext> etc. The defined commands are all listed in the command \@mb@citenamelist. In the documentation of multibib you find the following hint:
Packages which define new cite commands can add these commands using \@mb@citenamelist. The default definition, which already includes natbib’s cite variants, is given below.
```
\def\@mb@citenamelist{cite,citep,citet,citealp,citealt}
```
You see the commands citepalias and citetalias are missed. So before the package multibib is loaded add the following lines:
```
\makeatletter
\def\@mb@citenamelist{cite,citep,citet,citealp,citealt,citepalias,citetalias}
\makeatother
```

Based on the given information here the result as a minimal example with the resulting output. The compilation steps are done by the great tool arara:

% arara: pdflatex
% arara: bibtex : { files :[test , sec] }
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
%: Start Header
\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}

\makeatletter
\def\@mb@citenamelist{cite,citep,citet,citealp,citealt,citepalias,citetalias}
\makeatother
\usepackage{multibib}
\newcites{sec}{Other bibliographic references}

\defcitealias{manual-full}{International journal of logistics, issue 91}

\begin{document}

\cite{article-full}

\citesec{booklet-full}

Something something something and then \citepaliassec{manual-full}.

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{xampl}

\let\noopsort\undefined
\let\printfirst\undefined
\let\singleletter\undefined
\let\switchargs\undefined

\bibliographystylesec{plainnat}
\bibliographysec{xampl}

\end{document}

enter image description here

[Tex/LaTex] Lyx citation style: et al only when three or more authors

A well-known bibliography style that generates authoryear-style citation call-outs and uses & as the conjunction if the bib entry has exactly two authors (or editors) is agsm. This bibliography style is part of the harvard citation management package, but it's compatible with the natbib package as well.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Citation alias with multibib and natbib

[Tex/LaTex] Lyx citation style: et al only when three or more authors

Related Question