I am using biblatex for my citations as the below code shows:
\usepackage[
backend=biber,
style=authoryear,
dashed=false,
isbn=false,
uniquename=init,
giveninits=true,
maxbibnames=99,
maxcitenames=2,
]{biblatex}
By using the option maxcitenames=2, I would like to have references with more than 3 authors cited as "{First author} et al.".
For most of the references, I can get the desired citation style. However, for some references, biblatex cannot distinguish the first and the second authors. As a result, I have some in-text citations as "{First author}, {Second author}, et al.", which are very weird.
The following code show my entry in the bib file.
@article{Chiputwa2015,
author = {Chiputwa, Brian and Spielman, David J. and Qaim, Matin},
doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.09.006},
journal = {World Development},
pages = {400--412},
title = {Food standards, certification, and poverty among coffee farmers in
Uganda},
volume = {66},
year = {2015}
}
And the output that I got was "(Chiputwa, Spielman, et al., 2015)".
I would like to get it as "(Chiputwa et al., 2015)".
I tried to set maxcitenames = 1, but got a similar result. So I guess the problem is the biblatex cannot separate the first two authors.
biblatextries hard not to abbreviate different lists of people ("X, Y and A" and "X, Y and B") to the same short form ("X et al."). If you insist you can turn off this feature withuniquelist=false, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/69028/35864 – moewe May 29 '18 at 06:20