I am trying to figure out why, when using biblatex
with style = apa
, there is no .et al
abbreviation in my text with more than 3 authors. I cannot think of any plausible explanation, maybe someone sees smth that I don't in my latex preamble.
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[
backend = biber,
style = apa,
defernumbers=false,
uniquelist=true]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{english}{american-apa}
\usepackage{xpatch}
\AtEveryCitekey{\ifciteseen{}{\clearfield{namehash}}}
\xpatchbibmacro{cite}
{\printnames{labelname}}
{\ifciteseen
{\printnames{labelname}}
{\printnames[][1-99]{labelname}}}
{}
{}
\xpatchbibmacro{textcite}
{\printnames{labelname}}
{\ifciteseen
{\printnames{labelname}}
{\printnames[][1-99]{labelname}}}
{}
{}
\addbibresource{dummy_lit.bib} %name of the .bib file with my references
\begin{document}
I would like to have the abbreviation "et. al" in the running text whenever the references have more than three authors and not this:
\textcite{Author2000}
\end{document}
This is my bib entry stored in a separate file called: dummy_lit.bib
@Article{Author2000,
author = {Last name1, Firstname 1 and Last name2, First name2 and Last name3, First name3 and Last name4, First name4 and Last name5, First name5},
title = {The title of my article},
journal = {The journal},
year = {2000},
volume = {1},
number = {2},
pages = {1-10},
keywords = {ref}
}
Best Answer
APA style requires that up to five authors are shown in full on a first citation, lists of three to five authors are only abbreviated to "et al." on subsequent citations. See for example http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/11/the-proper-use-of-et-al-in-apa-style.html or 6.11 and 6.12 in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
And indeed if you cite an entry with five authors twice, you get.
So this is expected behaviour of the APA style as implemented by
biblatex-apa
.If you want to change that behaviour, have a look at Setting maxcitenames for biblatex-apa and set
\apamaxcitenames
to 3 in the example.Note that your two
\xpatchbibmacro
calls do nothing, because the patched code does not exist in the macros your are patching.