BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ "et al." doesn't typset properly

[markcordier]

I've been having trouble with "et al." in BiBTex. For some reason, it does not typeset properly and the citation key ends up being something like [ea91] (i guess it thinks "et al." is an author's last name.

I would like to either force the citation key to be something of my choosing (say, [BPA91]) or to format the "et al." so BiBTex recognizes it properly

I have tried the permutations listed below, the stuff after the ---> denotes what the entry becomes after it is typeset.

author={B.P. Abbott et al.} ---> B.P. Abbott et al.
author={et al., B.P. Abbott} ---> B.P. Abbott et al.
-the citation key for both of the above comes out to be [ea91], can I force this to be something of my choosing?

author={B.P. Abbott and et al.} ---> B.P. Abbott and et al.
author={B.P. Abbott, et al.} ---> et al. B.P. Abbott

I can't list all the authors and let BiBtex display "et al", since there are literally 100 or so authors on this paper. (I've also tried including only 20 authors to get it to display "et al." an it has displayed all 20).

thanks for any help you can offer

[josephwright]

Normally you should put all authors in your BibTeX database, and let the style file work out "et al." if needed

Code: Select all

author = {Other, A.N. and Blogg, F. and Author, T. }

If you really need to truncate the list, you have to use the special entry "others"

Code: Select all

author = {Other, A.N. and others}