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I need to change the format of my bibliography in order to have one author or at maximum two authors. I use bibtex and the \bibliographystyle{apacite}. Sometimes the citations are reported as "first author et al.", but the majority of times the citations are very long with up to five or six authors.

I overrode the default apacite.bst by creating a new myapacite.bst. Then, I modified the lines of the function authors.reflist.apa6 from #7 to #2. Finally, I copied this file both inside the directory of main.tex and inside the directory /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/apacite (Ubuntu 14.04) and I updated the database with sudo -H mktexlsr.

As last thing, I changed my bibliography style

\usepackage{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{myapacite}

Unfortunately, I does not work. I searched a lot without finding a solution. What I missing?

Tom Zych
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user54865
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  • You should not touch upon texmf-dist\. On updating your distribution, your modification might be overwritten. Any personal file, modification, &c., of general usage should be in texmf-local\. Now you might consider using \biblatex-apa, as it is a simple option([maxcitenames=xx, mincitenames=yy] on loading biblatex. – Bernard Jun 21 '14 at 08:59

1 Answers1

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Rather than modify the file apacite.bst, you could use the command \shortcite -- provided by the apacite package -- instead of \cite; the macro \shortcite generates "firstauthor et al" callouts for all entries with three or more authors.

If you want all citation callouts to be of the short form throughout the document, without replacing all \cite commands with \shortcite, you could insert the instruction

\let\cite\shortcite

in the preamble of your document, after loading apacite. That way, you can use \cite in the body of the document but get the citation callouts in the \shortcite form.

Mico
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