APA style formatting with et. al.

[Magnus]

Hi

There are a few discussions about citation and using et. al. instead of
multiple authors. But I can not find a satisfying answer for my question. I
wonder if there is any way that with using APA style get citations to
automatically use et. al. instead of multiple authors.

I want to have the second and later citations to have et al if the authors
are more than three.

 

[p0]

Hi

There are a few discussions about citation and using et. al. instead of
multiple authors. But I can not find a satisfying answer for my question.I
wonder if there is any way that with using APA style get citations to
automatically use et. al. instead of multiple authors.

Not directly no, you can change the code to do so though (although
that is complex according to most people).

I want to have the second and later citations to have et al if the authors
are more than three.  

Could you explain that last sentence a bit more? Suddenly you are
talking about 'second and later' (what do you mean by that anyways?)
while the previous paragraph seems to indicate all citations. Are you
talking about in-text citations? Or are you talking about the
bibliography at the end? I guess the easiest way to explain what you
want would be an example of what you currently have and what you want
to have.

Yves

 

[Magnus]

Thanks

I did a test and created some referenses with diffrent number of referenses:
I the added them twice as in-text citations. What I want is to have the
second time use "et al." instead of the authors name. I am using APA and when
having 7 or more authors it uses "et al." every time I use it.
(Authors, title, year)

(1, et al., 7 authors, 2008)
(1, et al., 7 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6, 6 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6, 6 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, 3, 4, & 5, 5 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, 3, 4, & 5, 5 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, 3, & 4, 4 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, 3, & 4, 4 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, & 3, 3 authors, 2008)
(1, 2, & 3, 3 authors, 2008)


/Magnus

 

[Magnus]

I found that changing the lcid to swedish (1053) changes the citation style.

(1, o.a., 7 författare, 2008)
(1, o.a., 7 författare, 2008)

So if that can change perhaps the author "count" can be changed!?

But I can not find any file with o.a. as a property anywhere i the office12
directory.

/Magnus

 

[p0]

The language specific settings are hardcoded into Word. They are
passed along together with the sources to the formatting engine. There
is no way to change/update those as far as I can tell. (It is possible
from within the formatting stylesheet, but it would seem
counterproductive to go that way.)

The problem with your request is that all in-text citations (even the
grouped ones) are coded independently. So, it is not possible to say
if some in-text citations has been used before within the same text.

If you want to change the number of authors to display, you will have
to do it for all in-text citations, not just for the first or second
or third one ... That said, the style you would have to update would
be located at <WinWord.exe directory>\Bibliography\Style\APA.xsl .

Yves

 

[Magnus]

Hi, sorry for the late reply. Been gone collecting data for my essay.

Well I guess I will have to edit all in text citations by hand.

/Magnus

 

[jimmy]

Basically, MS Word doesn't really format in APA. I was very disapointed
about that. MS -- if you are reading, this needs to be corrected. After the
first citation of a source with 3 or more authors, the citation should say
"(Author et al., Date)." Please fix this. Or at least don't have the
program say that the paper is in APA format when it isn't.

 

[Yves Dhondt]

Unfortunately, that's not possible to fix. One of the design decisions
(flaws) in the citation engine is that each in-text citation gets formatted
separately meaning it has no knowledge if the same source was cited before
or not.

Yves