How to make citet author italic

Question

I'm using natbib and IEEEtranN.bst (or IEEEtran.bst)

\usepackage[square,sort,comma,numbers]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtranN.bst}

I want to make the author name and et al. both italic without making the number italic with \citet{}. For example, I'd like

Kim et al. [8] propose the use of ...

I tried using lockstep's answer to change the IEEEtranN.bst file without success, by changing

FUNCTION {bbl.etal}{ "et~al." }

to

FUNCTION {bbl.etal}{ "\emph{et~al.}" }

Answer 1

If you want all \citeauthor commands to print the names in italics, patch \citeauthor to do \em:

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@article{kim,
  author={Kim, W. and Tim, X. and Vim, Y. and Zim, Z.},
  title={Three letter names},
  journal={Im},
  year=2015,
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[square,sort,comma,numbers]{natbib}
\usepackage{xpatch}

\xpatchcmd{\citeauthor}{\begingroup}{\begingroup\em}{}{}

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtranN.bst}

\begin{document}

\citeauthor{kim} \cite{kim} propose the use of three letter names.

\bibliography{\jobname}

\end{document}