Hi



I hope someone can help me. I am using Word 2013's built in option for referencing (APA 6th edition) and everything works great until I have more than 3 Authors in a citation. In APA 6th 3 plus should go in as "main author, et al." but I can't get it to do this and it won't let me edit it manually (can edit to supress author, year... but not what I need)

As an example;

What it does;
(Johnson, Whittington, Angwin, Regner, & Scholes, 2014)

What I need it to do is;
(Johnson et al., 2014)

Does anyone know how to do this with the inbuilt tool. I like to not convert to text so that I can use the automatic Reference / Bibliography build.

Many thanks for any help you are able to provide.

thanks

Chris

In my experience, Word's inbuilt referencing tools are not fully compliant with the various standards they purport to represent. As you've found that it doesn't handle the APA referencing properly, but it's even worse with Chicago. to get the proper format, you'll need to convert the references to text, then do some editing. Strange as it seems, the et al stuff has been implemented correctly in some of the other referencing systems...

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I had feared that this would be the case. It is such a shame that they haven't finished it off properly.

Manual edits it is then.

Many thanks for the quick response. It has helped me to stop messing around with this, accept it, and get back on with the ever decreasing dead line!

LS,

The forum denoted this as "Solved", however I'm still facing the problem. So far no clear solutions has been offered (at least I could not find it). Using the 'edit field' option right clicking in the citation field, might do the job:

Change: CITATION Mor09 \l 1033

in: CITATION Mor09 \n \t \l 1033 \f "Morales, et al., "

and: "(Morales, Martínez, Mandow, & García-Cerezo, Dec. 2009)"

will change in: "(Morales, et al., Dec. 2009)"

One has to do this manually, how to do this automatically?? I really do not know...

Succes!!!

You are supposed to add all the authors via Mange Sources>Source manager>Create new source. There, you'd insert them as, for example:
Morales, K; Martínez, M; Mandow, C M; García-Cerezo, B M
You do not do it by editing the field code - any such edits will likely be lost immediately the field is updated. Word will take care of the 'et. al' side of things for you. That said, Word's implementation of the various referencing systems is poor. When you're done editing the document and you've finished creating citations and bibliography entries, you'll probably need to convert the bibliography, especially, to text so you can make it conform to whatever referencing system you're using.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

LS, Best MicroPod

Apparently something has been learned in their evaluation towards Office 2013; I've 'field update' the crap out of my document, as well as opening and closing!

The citation remains: (Morales, et al., Dec. 2009)

Whereas the bibliographical text is:
Morales, J., Martínez, J. L., Mandow, A., & García-Cerezo, A. J. (Dec. 2009). Steering the Last Trailer as a Virtual Tractor for Reversing Vehicles With Passive On- and Off-Axle Hitches. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol.60, no.12, 5729 - 5736.

Maybe I'm just lucky, mist an option, or unconsciously clicked an option... I'll get back to you whenever it turns out wrong (again)...