Citing two authors with & instead of and

Question

I would like the citation for \citet{sample} to appear as:

Jonas & Brothers (2022) instead of Jonas and Brothers (2022).

How would you change and to & in the case of two-author citations?

Answer 1

Since you employ the apalike bibliography style -- BTW, apalike dates back to 1988 [!] and does not embed current APA formatting guidelines -- I suggest you proceed as follows:

• Find the file apalike.bst in your TeX distribution. Make a copy of this file and call the copy, say, apalike-ampersand.bst. (Do not edit an original file of the TeX distribution directly.)

• Open the file apalike-ampersand.bst in an editor. The program you use to edit your tex files will do fine.

• Locate both instances of the hard-coded string " and " in the bst file. (In my copy of the file, they occur on lines 225 and 851.) The first instance affects the formatting of multiple-author bibliographic entries, and the second affects the formatting of two-author citation call-outs.

• Change both instances to "~\& ".

• Save the file apalike-ampersand.bst either in the directory that contains your main tex file or in a directory that's searched by BibTeX. If you choose the second option, be sure to update the filename database of your TeX distribution in a suitable manner. (If you have no idea that the preceding sentence means, I suggest you employ the first option.)

• In your main tex file, change the instruction \bibliographystyle{apalike} to \bibliographystyle{apalike-ampersand} and perform a full recompilation run -- LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more -- to propagate all changes.

Happy BibTeXing!

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Here's a minimal example and associated screen shot that put these ideas to work.

\documentclass{article} % or some other suitable document class
% Create a sample bib file on the fly:
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{mybib.bib}
@misc{jb:2022, author={Xavier Jonas and Yves Brothers}, title={Thoughts}, year=2022}
@misc{abc:3001, author={Anne Author and Brenda Branford and Chiara Cavendish}, title = {Thoughts}, year=3001}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[authoryear,round]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{apalike-ampersand}
\begin{document}
\citet{jb:2022}, \citet{abc:3001}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}