Re: Bibliography: printing just Single Author et al.

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 2:29 PM, Csikos Bela wrote:
> Mojca Miklavec írta:
>>Hi,
>>
>>When citing articles with five authors I prefer to list all of them,
>>but in some articles with one hundred authors I would prefer just "J.
>>Someone et al." since listing five more co-authors doesn't add
>>anything substantial to the information.
>>
>>Is there any trick that would allow liming the number of listed
>>authors on per-article basis? Simply specifying
>>    author = "Just Someone et al.",
>
> It's not clear what you want exactly. That is, how many rules do you want regarding
> number of authors?
>
> I don't know how ConTeXt handes author numbers. But in normal bibtex this is generally
> implemented as max authors and min authors (naturally it depends on the bst file you use).
> If the total number of authors is less than or equal to max authors, all author names are listed.
> If total number of authors is more than max authors, min authors are listed followed by et al.
> By adjusting the bst file you can change every single details.
>
> An example: if you set max number to 7 and min number to 3, then in case of 7 or less
> authors all are listed, in case of 8 or more the first 3 are listed followed by et al.
>
> Would these two rules fit your requirements? Or do you want a third rule (in additon to the
> above rules) for very high number of authors, when only the very first author is listed?

Oh, interesting. I wasn't aware of that rule. I thought that in case
of "more than n" authors, the first n would be printed.

I was thinking of a rule "if I specify something special on this
particular entry, then print one author et al." (without me having to
bother to actually try to include all the hundred names if I know in
advance that none of them would be printed anyway), but a rule like
"if more than N, then print just one" would most probably work for me.

How does one set that lower number?

> In this case you have to edit the bst file as well. What makes it harder ConTeXt has special bst files and you have to edit those bst files.
>
> If you have only a few article like this, the easiest solution might be to edit the bib file, and change the author field to what you want in the output.
>
> This is a real shortcoming of ConTeXt bibliography generating mechanism. To customize
> it you have to be able to edit bst files and be very familiar with ConTeXt bibliography
> generating module, and TeX programming might be required too.

No, configuration of bibliographies in ConTeXt does not (and should
not) require knowledge of bst files. I always managed to get around
with some relatively straightforward settings and commands.

Mojca
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