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I’m a big fan of ampersands (possibly too much …) and I’d like to replace all mentions of “et al.” (included in citations) by \& al. – both in the main text (I use natbib citations of the form [Author1 et al., 1999]), and in the actual bibliography?

How can I do that, considering that BibTeX is inserting the words for me, and I have no control over the text? Preferably, I’d like to do this without creating my own bibliography style sheet (since I want to make this work regardless of the actual BibTeX style that is used), but if anyone can tell me how I need to edit the style sheet file, that would be fine as well (makebst doesn’t seem to offer an option for this …).

lockstep
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Konrad Rudolph
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    Hmm, I really don't think it's a good idea - it's completely non-standard (incorrect?) and I think it would be distracting for the reader. – Neil Olver Aug 07 '10 at 14:54
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    @Neil: The great thing about standards is there are so many of them from which to choose :-) I have seen it, though mostly in older works. My guess is that it is somewhat a function of discipline and geography. – vanden Aug 07 '10 at 15:21
  • @vanden: true :).

    @Konrad: why don't you want to change the bibtex style file? That should be quite easy I would think - possibly just a search/replace in the file.

     – Neil Olver Aug 07 '10 at 15:45
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    @Neil - you are aware that the ampersand began-as/is an "Et" ligature? – Heath Hunnicutt Aug 07 '10 at 19:31
  • @Neil: well, if you can tell me how I need to change the style file – fine. That’s the first thing I tried and et al. doesn’t even appear there. That said, I’d much prefer to have my customizations in a package, since I really want to have this change regardless of the BiBTeX style used. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 07 '10 at 19:55
  • Please don't do this. It is a bad idea. – BWW Aug 07 '10 at 20:47
  • @BWW: That’s what I’m trying to find out. But I wouldn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. My motivation for this is that et al. is a highly artificial construct anyway, and using the right font could incorporate this much more nicely into the text. After all, this is what the ampersand is there for – it’s got precedence. et al., on the other hand, is the odd duck. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 08 '10 at 09:05
  • This is a bad idea because it will alienate your potential readers. Perhaps not all of them but definitely some of them. You should leave this for people with more experience to decide. – BWW Aug 08 '10 at 16:19
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    @BWW: who are these people with more experience? Furthermore, I’m actually fine with alienating some people – I’m not a salesman. But for the record, I’m of course not doing this in a paper or some other document where uniform looks is an advantage. I’m doing it explicitly to create a distinctive look that doesn’t have to please everybody. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 08 '10 at 19:11
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    Most style guides that I have encountered discourage the use of ampersands in anything other than proper nouns (such as law firm names for example). – dreamlax Aug 09 '10 at 01:12
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    @dreamlax: You are not familiar with many style guides, I think. One of the most prominent, APA, mandates use of & within parentheses for inline references, as does MLA. CUP style notes this use and additionally says that it may be used to mark a distinction. Its use is on the decline, I think, but it is very respectable: Fowler's 1st ed. of Modern English Usage used it liberally in place of "and". I'd like to see more widely used, because there are good opportunities for beautiful typography with it. – Charles Stewart Nov 18 '10 at 10:20
  • @CharlesStewart -- Surely the use of '&' in Fowler's is for reasons of economy. In the front matter, he uses 'and', never '&'. New Hart's Rules (the current style guide for Oxford) concedes using an '&' to link two authors in an in-text citation for an author-date system, but not for 'et al.' ... However, tastes vary: when one is free of a publisher's rules, I say experiment. --- Oh, sorry: I did not realize how old your comment was! – jon May 31 '12 at 19:03
  • @jon One and a half years later I can confidently say that using “& al.” was the best typography decision I’ve ever made. It looks distinctive and elegant, and actually less clunky than the horrid artificial construct “et al.”. – Konrad Rudolph Jun 01 '12 at 10:34
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    @jon: I didn't actually look up a copy of the MEU 1st ed., rather Burchfield writes in the MEU 3rd ed. "H. W. Fowler used [the ampersand] throughout MEU and in early editions of COD and POD". The wider point being, if you are doing things for yourself, you do not need to be bound by other people's style guides. "&" is a contraction for "et", so it makes sense to substitute in "et al." just as "&c" is quite often used in place of "etc." Note also that ampersands are used a fair bit in poetry. – Charles Stewart Jun 06 '12 at 10:30
  • @CharlesStewart -- Of course. You'll note that I did not mean to discourage Konrad from using it (if one is not bound by a publisher's guidelines), only to point out that Fowler seemed to do it more to save space than because he thought it looked better. As for the et-ligature, it was also often used at the end of third-person singular verbs (say, "diceret") in Latin manuscripts (and in other words), but I don't think anyone would recommend this practice today: '&' is only possible in a few (rapidly diminishing) circumstances unless one wants to give an archaizing air to the text. – jon Jun 06 '12 at 13:03

3 Answers3

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Using the biblatex package, you only need to redefine one bibliography string:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=authoryear,maxnames=2]{biblatex}
\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{andothers={\&~al\adddot}}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{Aut10,
  author = {Author, A. and Buthor, B. and Cuthor, C.},
  year = {2010},
  title = {And now for something completely different},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}

Some text \autocite{Aut10}.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

enter image description here

lockstep
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Editing the .bst to make this kind of change is easy. Just search through the file and replace all instances of et al. with \& al. if that is your preference. In a few BSTs it may be entered differently, such as et~al. or similar, but this should be easy to figure out by looking in the generated BBL to find whatever form your particular BST is using.

Werner
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Lev Bishop
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    Ah! That explains why I didn’t find any hits for et al. in my bst file: it’s et~al.. Thanks! – Konrad Rudolph Aug 08 '10 at 09:12
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    You can use perl -pi'.orig' -e 's/et(?: |~)al./\\\& al./g' test.bst, in fact you could do this on the .bbl file afterwards if you . NB. you have to use " rather than ' on windows, but then again if you have windows you probably don't have Perl. – Joel Berger Feb 02 '11 at 00:58
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What type of citation style are you using, i.e. author name and year or numbers? If you are using numbered citations then you only need to make changes to the actual bibliography listing and the following method should work:

  1. Wait until the very end once you are sure that you don't need to run BibTeX again, i.e. when there are no further modifications to the .bib file needed and all the citations are in place in the .tex file.
  2. Do the usual LaTeX->BibTeX->LaTeX dance one last time just to be sure.
  3. Open the .bbl file in an editor and do a search and replace on "et al."

Now, next time you run LaTeX your bibliography will have your replacements in it. Be aware that running BibTeX again by accident will overwrite the .bbl file, so you might want to keep a copy of it in another directory just in case. Alternatively, you can just remove the bibliography commands from your .tex file and copy and paste the contents of the .bbl file in its place to have an old fashioned non-BibTeX bibliography.

BTW, editing the .bbl file like this can be a good way to correct minor annoyances in the way BibTeX works without writing your own stylesheet, but if you find yourself doing it a lot then it is probably time to bite the bullet and write one.

If you are using author and date style citations then I don't know how to change the "et al."s appearing in the main document itself without going in to the style file.

lockstep
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Matt Leifer
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    Hmm. I’m really opposed to editing (generated) intermediate files. Of course, this could be incorporated in the build process but it’s far from transparent. – Konrad Rudolph Aug 07 '10 at 19:51
  • The perl script given by Joel in a comment to the answer by Lev Bishop (or an equivalent sed script — it's all regexps after all) can be run on the bbl file as part of your build process. – Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson Nov 12 '11 at 23:46