How to force latex to abbreviate additional authors with "et al."?

Question

I use the "ecta" bibliography style and it works fine for one exception. I have many different citations that include more than 2 authors. However, there is only one citation latex is using the names of all authors instead of abbreviating it with et al.. I use the following command:

\citep[p.~37]{james2013introduction}

And the entry in the bib-file is as follows:

@book{james2013introduction,
title={An Introduction to Statistical Learning},
author={James, Gareth and Witten, Daniela and Hastie, Trevor J. and Tibshirani, Robert John},
year={2013},
publisher={Springer}
}

And I get the following citation in the text:

(James, Witten, Hastie, and Tibshirani, 2013: p. 37)

I tried to change the entry in the bib-file in many different ways. However, I couldn't figure out a way to solve this problem and would very much appreciate some help.

PS: The following is the exact code I am using in my file (calling the bib-file scholar):

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,fleqn]{article}
\usepackage[round,longnamesfirst,authoryear]{natbib}

\begin{document}

This citation causes the problem: \citep[p.~37]{james2013introduction}
\bibliographystyle{ecta}
\bibliography{scholar.bib}
\end{document}

Possible duplicate of biblatex: displaying all authors of multi-author works in the bibliography — padawan, Jan 19 '16 at 00:19
@ cagirici Thanks for the comment. There is only one entry for which two authors (out of four) are equivalent. That shouldn't be a problem, right? I checked for duplicates already. — Patrick Balada, Jan 19 '16 at 00:25
@cagirici Isn't that question about Biblatex? This one is not. — cfr, Jan 19 '16 at 00:27
@PatrickBalada Please provide a complete minimal example. We've got (I guess) a minimal .bib (but you need to check that no further entries are needed) but we lack a complete example we can copy-paste-compile to reproduce the issue. — cfr, Jan 19 '16 at 00:27
@cfr Thanks for the comment. I added all relevant parts of my document. — Patrick Balada, Jan 19 '16 at 00:39

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 19 '16 at 03:19

Don't specify the longnamesfirst option when loading natbib if you don't want the names of all authors shown the first time a multiple-author piece is cited. And, since the ecta bibliography style uses authoryear-style citation callouts surrounded in parentheses, the natbib options round and numberyear are not needed either (although providing them does no harm either).

A separate comment: Don't include the substring .bib in the argument of \bibliography. I.e., write \bibliography{scholar} rather than \bibliography{scholar.bib}.

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{scholar.bib}
@book{james2013introduction,
   title     = {An Introduction to Statistical Learning},
   author    = {James, Gareth and Witten, Daniela and 
                Hastie, Trevor J. and Tibshirani, Robert John},
   year      = {2013},
   publisher = {Springer},
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,fleqn]{article}
\usepackage{natbib}

\begin{document}
This citation no longer causes a problem: \citep[p.~37]{james2013introduction}
\bibliographystyle{ecta}
\bibliography{scholar}
\end{document}

@ Mico Awesome - it worked. Thank you so much for the effort you put in! — Patrick Balada, Jan 19 '16 at 07:58

How to force latex to abbreviate additional authors with "et al."?

1 Answers1