I often have to convert plain text citations [e.g. (Author et al. 2006)] into paperpile citations. If I copy a plain text citation which contains the substring “et al” and paste it into the “Insert citation” popup I get no matching results. This forces me to manually delete the “et al” portion of the search string before Paperpile will find the matching reference. This seemingly minor issue is a great source of frustration, particularly as the citation which Paperpile inserts also contains “et al”.
It would be great if paperpile either (a) ignored “et al” in searches; or (b) was smart enough to recognise the semantic meaning of “et al” and only returned matches in the which the preceding word is the name of the first author.