[Tex/LaTex] How to change the apacite bibliography style to list all authors

apa-stylebibliographiesbibtex

I am new to LaTeX and I need to format my bibliography according to the newest version of APA manual (6th version). As I use bibtex and the \bibliographystyle{apacite}, not all the references are displayed correctly.

Now, I wish to force LaTeX to always list all of the authors in the bibliography, but to keep the rest of the apacite style. Can I do that? Or could I, for example, force LaTeX to list all authors only in a few special cases (because that problem does only occur three or four times in total)?

An Example (sorry for not putting it earlier): An entry in the .bib looks as follows

@article{55,
  title={An SCN9A channelopathy causes congenital inability to experience pain},
  author={Cox, James J and Reimann, Frank and Nicholas, Adeline K and Thornton, Gemma and Roberts, Emma and Springell, Kelly and Karbani, Gulshan and Jafri, Hussain and Mannan, Jovaria and Raashid, Yasmin and L. Al-Gazali and H. Hamamy and E. M. Valente and S. Gorman and R. Williams and D. P. McHale and J. N. Wood and F. M. Gribble and C. G. Woods},
  journal={Nature},
  volume={444},
  number={7121},
  pages={894--898},
  year={2006},
  publisher={Nature Publishing Group}
}

And what appears in the pdf is the following:

Cox, J. J., Reimann, F., Nicholas, A. K., Thornton, G., Roberts, E., Springell, K., ...
Woods, C. G. (2006). An scn9a channelopathy causes congenital inability to expe-
rience pain. Nature, 444(7121), 894–898.

Now, I do not want LaTeX to make these …, but to list all of the authors. This problem only appears when there are many others, which is not very often. I wonder: Can I change something inside the single entry in the .bib to make all authors appear? Because reprogramming the whole style would be quite difficult, right?

Best Answer

Beginning with the 6th edition of the APA manual, the following is supposed to happen with entries that have more than seven (i.e., eight or more) authors: The names of the first 6 authors should be listed, followed by ..., followed by the name of the final author. See, e.g., p. 23 of the user guide of the apacite package for more information on this new requirement.

If you truly wish (or need) to override this requirement and list all authors, you could do so by creating and using a modified copy of apacite.bst:

Find the file apacite.bst in the directory structure of your TeX distribution. Make a copy, and name the copy, say, myapacite.bst. (Don't edit an original file of your TeX distribution directly.)
Open the file myapacite.bst in your favorite text editor and search for the function authors.reflist.apa6. (It starts on line 2926 in my copy of the file.)
In this function, change the two instances of #7 to #999 (or some other rather large integer). [Aside: A perfectionist would rewrite the entire function so as to get rid of the limit of authors entirely. I believe that simply changing the #7 instances gets you to where you want to go, but with much less fuss...]
Save the file myapacite.bst, either in the directory where your main .tex file is located or somewhere where it'll be found by BibTeX. If you choose the latter method you will probably also need to update TeX's filename database, in a way that's appropriate for your TeX distribution.
Start using the new bibliography style by issuing the commands
```
\usepackage{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{myapacite}
```

For instance, the entry you provide in your posting will by typeset like this:

enter image description here

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Citing with the “apacite” package and bibliography style

Your example code shows you use the apacite package and associated apacite bibliography style, which implement referencing and citing according to the conventions of the APA (American Psychological Association) manual, 6th ed.

Addendum Nov. 2021: The 6th edition is no longer the most recent, or current, version of the APA formatting guidelines. If you need to format the bibliography according to the 7th edition of the APA manual, you'll need to switch to biblatex, as there is (at present) no BibTeX-based implementation of the newer guidelines.

According to the 6th edition of the APA manual, the following guidelines must be followed when referencing and citing entries with multiple authors:

For the bibliography section:

If there are up to seven [7] authors, all of them must be listed.
With eight or more authors, the first six should be listed, followed by dots (...), followed by the name of the final author.

For citations:

With one or two authors, all should be listed in each citation call-out.
If a piece has six or more authors, the recommended citation call-out is FirstAuthor et al. for all citation instances.
With three to five authors, the full list is included the first time the piece is cited; subsequent citations should use FirstAuthor et al.
The preceding convention can be overridden on a case-by-case basis using the commands \fullcite and \shortcite, resp.

You also asked:

For quotations, I'd have wanted it to output "FirstAuthor et al., year" for all references with more than 2 authors. However, it behaves quite strangely - for 3-author papers, sometimes it outputs all the names, some other times just FirstAuthor et al. Any idea why this could be[?]

Not having an actual document of your's available to study, the following is just a hunch: I'm guessing that you're observing that when some citations of pieces with three to five authors are repeated, you're getting the FirstAuthor et al look. In contrast, first-time citations of entries with three to five authors end up with all authors being listed.

The following MWE shows that the apacite package and associated apacite bibliography style implement the requirements laid out in the APA manual. (Actually, since none of the entries you provided have more than seven authors, the rendering of entries with eight and more authors is left to the reader as an optional exercise.)

enter image description here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{cogsci,pslatex,apacite} 
\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\setlength\parindent{0pt} % just for this example
\begin{document}
\cite{anderson}

\cite{anderson}


\cite{chater_vitany}

\cite{chater_vitany}


\shortcite{baggio}

\fullcite{baggio}


\cite{braas}

\cite{braas}

\fullcite{braas}

\bibliography{test} % 'test.bib' provided in the original posting
\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] How to change the apacite citation style to list only “first author et al.” for entries with three or more authors

Rather than modify the file apacite.bst, you could use the command \shortcite -- provided by the apacite package -- instead of \cite; the macro \shortcite generates "firstauthor et al" callouts for all entries with three or more authors.

If you want all citation callouts to be of the short form throughout the document, without replacing all \cite commands with \shortcite, you could insert the instruction

\let\cite\shortcite

in the preamble of your document, after loading apacite. That way, you can use \cite in the body of the document but get the citation callouts in the \shortcite form.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Citing with the “apacite” package and bibliography style

[Tex/LaTex] How to change the apacite citation style to list only “first author et al.” for entries with three or more authors

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