Tags: latex March 29, 2009    

Recently, I had to deal with accents and et al inside of the author section inside of a bibtex entry. Three lessons arose from that experience. First, for bibtex to automatically add et al, you need to use the "and others" phrase. Second, for accents, the letter needs to be put in parentheses and both the accent and letter needs to be put in parentheses. Third, the entry cannot be put in quotes. For example,

author={A.~B.~C.~Do{\~{n}}a and others},

is correct. Other variations such as

author="{A.~B.~C.~Do{\~{n}}a and others}",

author={{A.~B.~C.~Do\~{n}a} and others},

author={A.~B.~C.~{Do\~{n}a} and others},

et cetera, are not correct and will screw up ordering and possibly not show the accent. Using et al is also not correct. Using et al (e.g. author="{A.~Back et al.}",) tends to screw up the ordering of entries and does not work when a person has four name, in which case the last name tends to turn into an initial, at least under some styles.

Bottom line is to have the entry look like this: author={A.~B.~C.~Do{\~{n}}a and others},

Copyright © 2009 Borys Bradel. All rights reserved. This post is only my possibly incorrect opinion.