11

The skeleton of my article looks like 

\documentclass[10pt, twoside]{article}
\title{An Example}
\author{S. Barman Roy}
\begin{document}
....
\bibliographystyle{unsrt}
\bibliography{library}
\end{document}

Among the bib items, whenever an article has only two authors, it's appearing perfectly as

[1] John Doe and Richard Rane ....

However, when I have more than two authors for an article, it appears as

[1] Johan Doe, Richard Rane, and Tommy Atkins...

How do I get rid of the comma before the and? The problem persists even if I change the bib style to something else, 'IEEEtran' for example, which I use most frequently.

lockstep
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Della
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  • Welcome to TeX.SX. I am not an native English speaker, but isn't that correct, as it is? Maybe check on http://english.stackexchange.com – LaRiFaRi Aug 26 '13 at 13:35
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    OK, as I am interested in that, too, I had a look. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412/should-i-put-a-comma-before-the-last-item-in-a-list . So that's an "Oxford comma". Sounds great :-). If you still want to get rid of it, I can't help, sorry. – LaRiFaRi Aug 26 '13 at 13:39
  • @LaRiFaRi I am not a native speaker either, but I never used comma before 'and'. Your link and a little bit of googling tells me it's common in the US and less common in British English. So it's more of a language issue than a latex issue. Thanks a lot for correcting my wrong assumption. – Della Aug 26 '13 at 14:30

2 Answers2

8

The comma in front of the word "and" is a so-called Oxford comma. It is correct English but not mandatory. You may read further information here on english.stackexchange.

As it seems to be a matter of localization (more used in the US than in the UK), a possible "fix" should be provided by the chosen bib-style or the general localization done by babel or alike. It is not necessary to hack that issue yourself.

Community
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LaRiFaRi
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0

If you use biblatex, just do

\renewcommand{\finalnamedelim}{ and }
Derek
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