[pdftex] Italic et al with Natbib

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, David Vannucci wrote:

> Thank you for the comments I have received so far,
> 
> I believe I have inappropriately phrased my first question,
> >Does anyone know how to make the citations have an italic et al.
> 
> I was specifically looking for help with Natbib and the et als that appear
> in my pdf due to a long set of authors being automatically contracted. I am
> unable to edit my bbl file since the full author names appear in there. I
> was wondering if there is any package for natbib that provides an italic et
> al automatically or alternativley if a parameter exists in Natbib for such
> an operation. This problem is turning out to be far more complex than I
> initially thought it would be.

It is a function of the .bst file used.  You can use custom-bib which has
an etal-it option to generate such files and they end up with entries like

FUNCTION {format.names}
{ 's :=
  #1 'nameptr :=
  s num.names$ 'numnames :=
  numnames 'namesleft :=
    { namesleft #0 > }
    { s nameptr
      "{vv~}{ll}{, jj}{, f.}" format.name$ 't :=
      nameptr #1 >
        {
          namesleft #1 >
            { ", " * t * }
            {
              t "others" =
                { " " * "et~al." emphasize * }    <===========
                { bbl.and space.word * t * }
              if$
            }
          if$
        }
        't
      if$
      nameptr #1 + 'nameptr :=
      namesleft #1 - 'namesleft :=
    }
  while$
}

It is actually very simple if you look in the right place.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595