Hello all,
The official Science journal referencing format requires all paper authors to be listed, however, the Science (and same for Science Advances, for example) style introduces an “et al.” after the first author if more than 4 or 5 (not sure) authors exist.
Is there an alternative style that we can use? Something like “Science-noEtAl”? Can we add the correct reference as a CSL file with a free account?
Thanks in advance,
Daniel
This is an interesting issue. The style guide states explicitly to list all authors and not use et. al. or similar, but the examples on the same page contradict this. Recent papers (such as this one) also use et al.
Unfortunately the add-on does not support custom styles, but there is a workaround which could work for a small number of papers. Go to the gear --> Manage references. Then replace the author field with your formatted list inside curly braces: {J. B. Pease, M. W. Hahn}. Paperpile will then treat this as a single author which is to be formatted as presented within those braces.
Hi Jason, thanks for the suggestion (good to know!). I think the examples you mention are for preprints or electronic publications before print, which is indeed inconsistent but it’s what is in the paper you linked.
All “normal” citations though show the complete list of authors.
So I still believe the Science style is incorrect. Here I managed to actually edit the Science CSL and upload it to my custom styles (had to ask for an extension of the trial period) (I was trying your suggestion earlier but couldn’t find another style with the list of names as First Name Last Name, so it would take me a few days to do this by hand).
I might have to go for the paid version of Paperpile, but nevertheless believe that wrong formatting styles shouldn’t be what should have made me do that.
We currently rely on a community-maintained repository of citation styles as it is not possible for us to vet all 8000+ styles. The resulting styles are a compromise between the style guidelines, the capabilities of the CSL specification (the tool we use to format citations), and other practicalities.
You can find a discussion of the issue you mention here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/issues/3881 . The discussion seems to have trailed off in January, but it remains open in case you or anyone else here wants to contribute to it.
We have been considering making changes to some popular styles to bring them more in line with style specifications, but do not have anything concrete on this front at the moment.
FYI, Daniel, PP does not create or maintain the styles. They are an open source project (https://citationstyles.org/). PP merely uses them to create the references and citations. Correcting a style problem is likely best handled by the CSL team https://citationstyles.org/contact/
Jason, Bruce, I knew the styles were from CSL but I thought they were curated at some point. It is totally understandable then, and the issue lies with the source.