Comma before "and" in citations; multiple authors

A

Ananke

I am using the Polish version of Office 2007, and I can't get the citations
to work properly. First, whatever style I use which puts the authors in the
citation (Chicago/Turabian, mostly, I think), there is a comma before the
'and others'/'et al.', which should be absent in Polish. Secondly, when a
work has two or three authors, it puts all of them inside the citation. It's
pretty annoying, really.

So, after browsing this group, I'm now reading up on this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2007/12/14/bibliography-citations-1011.aspx

....but is there an easier way? Some kind of a patch, perhaps? Where should I
be looking, if there does exist one?
 
G

grammatim

But that's correct Chicago style: for any work with one, two, or three
authors, all authors are named every time. With four or more authors,
all are named in the reference list or bibliography, and references
give the first author and (no comma) et al.
 
P

p0

I am using the Polish version of Office 2007, and I can't get the citations
to work properly. First, whatever style I use which puts the authors in thecitation(Chicago/Turabian, mostly, I think), there is a comma before the
'and others'/'et al.', which should be absent in Polish. Secondly, when a
work has two or three authors, it puts all of them inside thecitation. It's
pretty annoying, really.

So, after browsing this group, I'm now reading up on this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2007/12/14/biblio...

...but is there an easier way? Some kind of a patch, perhaps? Where should I
be looking, if there does exist one?

Hi Ananke,

I agree with grammatim when it comes to the correctness of the style.

Anyway, you can always edit the styles to your needs.

Firstly, the 'and others' or 'et al.' is displayed by calling the
"templ_str_AndOthersUnCap" template in the different stylesheets. So
if you really want to change the styles, you should look for the
string
<xsl:call-template name="templ_str_AndOthersUnCap"/>
Depending on when this line occurs, the line(s) just above it are used
to display the separators before the 'and others' or 'et al.'

Secondly, within the stylesheets, the cAuthors variable is used by
Microsoft to store the number of authors in the list to authors. This
value is compared against several other numbers to decide how many
authors to display. So all changes will have to be around there.

For example in the Turabian-style, the lines

<xsl:when test = "$cAuthors > 3 and position() = $minAuthors">
<xsl:call-template name="templ_prop_ListSeparator"/>
<xsl:call-template name="templ_str_AndOthersUnCap"/>
</xsl:when>

means that if there are more than 3 authors (in your case that should
be 1) and the position of the current author being handled equals the
minimum number of authors necessary to distinguish the citation
between all citations, the list separator (which you don't want) will
be displayed followed by 'and others'. The following line

<xsl:when test = "$cAuthors > 3 and position() > $minAuthors"></
xsl:when>

then means that if there are more than 3 authors, and you already have
displayed the necessary amount of authors to to distinguish the
citation between all citations, nothing should be displayed. So this
actually handles all authors left after displaying the necessary ones.
And so the structure continues ...

It might take you some time to get through the entire structure and
understand what does what but you should be able to tweak it to your
preferences with some trial and error. That will be a lot easier than
designing the entire stylesheet from scratch.

It would have been nice of Microsoft to actually work with variables
such as MaxAuthors which could be set at one point and which then are
used to handle everything. Maybe if they read this, they might
consider it for a next version.

BR,

Yves
 

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