BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Strange citations now and then with ALL names instead of et al.

[tusenfem]

Hi!

I am new here on the forum, I searched but I may have missed if this problem has been discussed already.

Sometimes, when I cite a paper, either in my own LaTeX template or using one of the journal templates I get citations in the text like:

"and BepiColombo data. [Schmid, Plaschke, Narita, Heyner, Mieth, Anderson, Volwerk, Matsuoka and Baumjohann, 2020]"

instead of getting

"and BepiColombo data. [Schmid et al., 2020a]"

with the bibitem in my bibliography the same as any other item

@article{schm20a,
author = {D. Schmid and F. Plaschke and Y. Narita and D. Heyner and J. Z. D. Mieth and B. J. Anderson and M. Volwerk and A. Matsuoka and W. Baumjohann},
doi = {10.5194/angeo-38-823-2020},
journal = {Ann. Geophys.},
pages = {824 - 832},
title = {Magnetometer in-flight offset accuracy for the {BepiColombo} spacecraft},
volume = {38},
year = {2020},
}

and yes, there is also a schm20b, which does the same.
This is not just my problem, I noticed in papers for which I was a referee that the same thing happens for other authors.

Is there a solution here?
Thanks for your help.

Martin

[kaiserkarl13]

This works fine for me. Please post a minimal working example that reproduces the problem if you want us to diagnose further.

One guess is that it could be a BibTeX error that you are ignoring---I see this a lot when people use TeXmaker or a similar IDE-like environment that doesn't pause on errors, so that's something to check.

[tusenfem]

Okay, a bit late back, but anyway.

Here is an example that works, where I get the reference as [Schmid et al., 2020]

\documentclass[11pt]{article}

\usepackage[a4paper, total={6.5in, 9in}]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[usenames, dvipsnames]{color}
\usepackage{shapepar}
\usepackage{picinpar}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage[square]{natbib}
\usepackage{marvosym}
\usepackage{eurosym}
\usepackage{lineno}
\usepackage{wasysym}

\bibliographystyle{agsm}

\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.5}
\newcommand{\red}[1]{\textcolor{red}{#1}}

\begin{document}

\begin{center}
{\Large \bf Mercury's Plasma ULF Wave Environment} \\
\end{center}

However, the neutral hydrogen exosphere is not hampered by the solar wind and can expand further out than the bow shock \citep[see e.g.][]{schm20a}. Heavier species, such as He, Na, K, Ca, Mg, Al, Fe, and Mn are also present in Mercury's exosphere, however, they have a much smaller scale height, $\sim 700$ km, and do not exit the bow shock or the magnetopause, although they can be ejected to high altitudes through meteoroid impacts on the surface.

\bibliography{../Bibtexfiles/bigref_20190712}

\end{document}

Where in the bib file there is:

@article{schm20a,
author = {D. Schmid and F. Plaschke and Y. Narita and D. Heyner and J. Z. D. Mieth and B. J. Anderson and M. Volwerk and A. Matsuoka and W. Baumjohann},
doi = {10.5194/angeo-38-823-2020},
journal = {Ann. Geophys.},
pages = {824 - 832},
title = {Magnetometer in-flight offset accuracy for the {BepiColombo} spacecraft},
volume = {38},
year = {2020},
}

@article{schm20b,
author = {D. Schmid and F. Plaschke and N. V. Erkaev and M. Volwerk and W. Baumjohann and Y. Narita and B. J. Anderson and H. Lammer},
doi = {10.1038},
journal = {Nature Comm.},
pages = {submitted},
title = {Magnetic evidence for an extended hydrogen exosphere at {Mercury}},
volume = {-},
year = {2020},
}

When I now add in the LaTeX file also the second reference "schm20b" then the result is that I get in the text the following citation "[Schmid, Plaschke, Narita, Heyner, Mieth, Anderson, Volwerk, Matsuoka and Baumjohann, 2020]" instead of [Schmid et al., 2020a].

I do have other references with "a" and "b" and they seem to work without any problems.

Thanks for your help.
Martin