8

My supervisor wants me to use an apalike bibliography style. However, he would like the "et al." mention to be in italic.

When more than 2 authors are cited, LaTeX writes something like:

[John et al., 2020]

and my supervisor would like something like

[John et al., 2020].

Do you know any bibstyle which does such a thing? Or a way in which I could implement it myself?

Mico
  • 506,678
outofthegreen
  • 235
  • 2
    Welcome to TeX.SX! You have tagged the question with biblatex, but the question body mentions apalike, which is a BibTeX style (no la) and the title also says "BibTeX". Are you open for a biblatex solution (bearing in mind that you can not use .bst files like apalike with biblatex and that there is no style that gives exactly the same output as apalike out of the box)? – moewe Mar 12 '20 at 18:55
  • Sorry, I'm speaking of bibTeX, not biblaTeX but if a solution exist only on bibLaTeX, I'm ready to learn it. – outofthegreen Mar 12 '20 at 19:03
  • 2
    If you look in the apalike.bst file (http://ftp.cs.stanford.edu/tex/bibtex/apalike.bst), you will find (EDIT) 3 occurrence(s) of et al. You can create a new bib style by making a copy of that file, renaming it and editing that single occurrence to be italic. Then have your document reference the new bibliography style. – Steven B. Segletes Mar 12 '20 at 19:03
  • 2
    @StevenB.Segletes - Actually, there are three instances of " et~al." in the file. :-) – Mico Mar 12 '20 at 19:05
  • @Mico Ah ha. Some are "et al" some are "et~al" – Steven B. Segletes Mar 12 '20 at 19:05
  • With biblatex it is extremely easy to make the "et al." appear in italics, see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/40798/35864. But as I mentioned before biblatex will not easily give you exactly the same output as apalike, so if your professor insists on that, a better choice is probably to modify a copy of apalike.bst (as suggested by Steven B. Segletes). – moewe Mar 12 '20 at 19:07
  • so I should replace "et al" by "\emph{et al}" ?. @moewe he is flexible with apa style, he just wants the "et al" in italics – outofthegreen Mar 12 '20 at 19:07
  • Yes, I think that should work. Note @Mico 's comment that there are in fact three occurrences, some with some without a hard space separator – Steven B. Segletes Mar 12 '20 at 19:08
  • @StevenB.Segletes - The lone instance of "et al" (without the ~ character) in the bst file is somewhat tricky, and it should not be changed to "\emph{et~al}". The reason I call it "tricky" is that it's used exclusively for sorting purposes. Hence my recommendation not to modify that string... – Mico Mar 12 '20 at 19:19
  • 3
    @Mico That's why you got my upvote! Great discernment. – Steven B. Segletes Mar 12 '20 at 19:23

1 Answers1

11

I suggest you proceed as follows:

  • Find the file apalike.bst in your TeX distribution. Make a copy of this file and name the copy, say, apalike-etal-in-italics.bst. (Don't edit the original copy of apalike.bst directly.) Naturally, you're free to choose a different file name.

  • Open the file apalike-etal-in-italics.bst in a text editor. The program you use to edit your tex files will do fine.

  • Replace all three instances of the string " et~al." with " \textit{et~al.}". In my copy of the file, the instances occur on lines 224, 848, and 850.

  • Do not modify the lone instance of "et al" on line 927. It's used for sorting purposes only, and it is used only for entries for which the list of authors was truncated and replaced by the keyword "and others". Observe that the string "et al" doesn't contain a tie (tilde) and doesn't end in a . ("period", aka "full stop").

  • Save the file apalike-etal-in-italics.bst either in the directory where your main tex file is located 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 suitably.

  • In your mail tex file, replace

    \bibliographystyle{apalike}

    with

    \bibliographystyle{apalike-etal-in-italics}

    and perform a full recompile cycle -- LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more -- to fully propagate all changes.

Happy BibTeXing!

Mico
  • 506,678