How to change the apacite bibliography style to list all authors

Question

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?

Answer 1

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: