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As many people I would like to follow the English-language typesetting convention that Latin abbreviations are set in italics (Examples being e.g., i.e. or et al.). While this is easy enough for e.g. and i.e. which I can define as a newcommand, I would like to use \citeauthor for a bit more automatisation. However, the et al. produced is not in italics.

Now, I realise there are many similar questions, HOWEVER: most of them answer this issue using biblatex or the answer is essentially "make your own .bst file" (BibTeX style with "et al" in italic) or even "change the existing .bst (emphasizing "et al.") The latter being a big No-no.

I am working with a given journal template (more specifically the beilstein class available on CTAN) that uses bibtex (archaic, I know), so, yes I can define my own commands to a certain extent, but I cannot use customised .bst files nor biblatex syntax.

Is there an easy way to this or should I rather stick to manually spelling out the author names with a custom et al.-command?

Markus G.
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    https://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjnano/authorInstructions says "The Authors should adhere to the ACS Style Guide [...] on matters of [...] references, use of italics and punctuation." The ACS Style Guide says "Do not use italic type for common Latin terms and abbreviations." and explicitly lists "et al." as a common Latin abbreviation. So I think Beilstein want no italics here. This is corroborated by published papers like https://doi.org/10.3762%2Fbjnano.9.98, where all "et al."s are upright. – moewe Jul 29 '21 at 18:36
  • Apart from that I don't really see a safe way to do this without changes to the .bst file. The only way I could see to do this from the LaTeX side at all would involve capturing and post-processing the author information. But that would require patches to internal macros and additional machinery, something journals are generally not fond of at all. – moewe Jul 29 '21 at 18:38

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