[texhax] Complex rule for citations of papers with multiple authors.

[Schneider]

Rolf:

> The journal of which I am Technical Editor has the following rules about
> citing papers with multiple authors:
> 
> (1) For one author use the form "Green (1999)".
> (2) For two authors use the form "Black & Tan (1993)"
> (3) For three authors, use all names "Red, White & Blue (2001)" the first
> time, and then "Red et al. (2001)" subsequently.
> (4) For four or more authors, always use the form "Gray et al. (2007)".

> I would like to have a bibliography style that effected these rules
> automagically.  Is this possible?  Is there a way in which I could modify
> the Journal's current bibliography style file ("anzsj.bst") to get it to
> effect these rules?
> 
> I have the feeling that (1), (2) and (4) should be straightforward, but (3)
> could be tricky.

The Journal of Molecular Biology bib style does that kind of thing:

https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/ftp/jmb.bst
That's the latest version that I've worked on,
% version = 1.37 of jmb.bst 2000 Nov 29
However, this version uses numbers in the text, you would have
to undo that setting.

In CTAN or Texlive:

https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/contrib/jmb?lang=en
there is an older version:
% version = 1.21 of jmb.bst 1992 June 29
This works and gives spelled out references in the text.

Just call:
\bibliographystyle{jmb}

This was derived from apalike which should be part of your Texlive package.
Just call:
\bibliographystyle{apalike}

Note that bst is a weird stack language.  It is quite programmable and
so things like this (conditional ifs) are possible.

I put this together in an example directory:

https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/threeauth/

(Note that I use links and atchange to run things from the command
line conveniently. https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/atchange.html)

BOTTOM LINE:

\bibliographystyle{jmb}

This gets most of what you want - with '&' instead of 'and' but it
doesn't do 3 authors correctly.  You would have to hack the bst code
to get that case.

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  Senior Investigator
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Center for Cancer Research
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  schneidt at mail.nih.gov
  https://schneider.ncifcrf.gov (current link)
  https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent link)