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I am using the following package for the citation:

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=authoryear-icomp ,natbib=true]{biblatex}

The problem is that while using the commands \citep or \citet, for articles that have multiple authors, all authors are listed in the citation. For example:

citation example

Instead, for more than two authors I'd like the citation to look like the following:

correct-citation-example

How can this be done?

moewe
  • 175,683
Mai
  • 87

1 Answers1

1

If you want APA style as mentioned in the title, you should probably load APA style via

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa, natbib=true]{biblatex}

instead of style=authoryear-icomp,. The latter is just a 'generic' author-year style (with ibid. and compressed citations) and not APA.

\documentclass[american]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa]{biblatex}


\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}


\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson,companion,worman,geer}


\printbibliography
\end{document}

Lorem (Geer, 1985; Goossens et al., 1994; Sigfridsson & Ryde, 1998; Worman, 2002)

Note that there are some situations where APA style wants more than one author + et al., namely when two papers with different lists of authors would abbreviate to the same first author + et al.: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/same-year-first-author. biblatex-apa implements this rule, so you may occasionally see more than just first author + et al.

If you don't want real APA style and can live with a generic author-year, you want to change the value of the maxcitenames and mincitenames options (see e.g. biblatex: displaying all authors of multi-author works in the bibliography).

\documentclass[american]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=authoryear-icomp, mincitenames=1, maxcitenames=2]{biblatex}


\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}


\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson,companion,worman,geer}


\printbibliography
\end{document}

Lorem (Geer 1985; Goossens et al. 1994; Sigfridsson and Ryde 1998; Worman 2002)

Again, biblatex tries to ensure that different lists do not collapse to the same first author + et al., but this feature can be disabled via the uniquelist option. See Set limit to one author when using "et al." in biblatex and Biblatex: Have only one author in citation -- multiple articles with same first author, different year. A related feature that sometimes throws people off is the uniquename feature: Literature with Biber generates strange citations: firstnames appear erratically.

moewe
  • 175,683
  • I would like to thank you very much, your answer is perfect and helpful. Actually, it solved my problem. But I have further questions regarding using \utocite{} and \cite. It is the first time for me to use \autocite. Can not we use \cite instead of \autocite to produce the same result? – Mai Aug 04 '22 at 21:39
  • @Mai \autocite is a high-level citation command whose output can be changed with the autocite option. In case of the two documents here it basically behaves like \parencite. For real APA style you'll want to use \parencite and \textcite depending on whether you have a parenthetical or narrative citation. I normally prefer not to use \cite, but in theory we could redefine \cite to do what \autocite does. But then you can just do a search-and-replace job in your document and don't need to mess with the definitions. – moewe Aug 04 '22 at 21:45