New Post: Changing the way authors are reported in Vancouver style

Hi Andy,

Greetings from Johannesburg, South Africa!

I was working with BibWord’s Vancouver style sheet last night and didn’t have any problem with et al.

The Style Sheet processes this when you input the names of more than6 authors.

You shouldn’t type in et al yourself in the name line because the style sheet thinks this is a name and then abbreviates it to initials = ‘ea’.

(You may get away with typing the names and ‘et al’ in the Corporate Author name line: I haven’t tried that.)

You have to type in ALL 7 or more names to get it to output the first author, followed by et al.

Here is an example given in “International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Sample References”:

(The colour highlighting was put in by me for my own reference.)

More than six authors:

Rose ME, Huerbin MB, Melick J, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Regulation of interstitial excitatory amino acid concentrations after cortical contusion injury. Brain Res. 2002;935(1-2):40-6.

Style Sheet output =

Rose ME, Huerbin MB, Melick J, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Regulation of interstitial excitatory amino acid concentrations after cortical contusion injury. Brain Res. 2002;935(1-2):40-46.

Your source example of ‘Poirier P, Marois L et al’ indicates that the version of Vancouver for this uses et al for three or more sources.

As stated above, ICMJE uses et al for more than 6.

You can edit the BibWord style sheet to output et al for more than 2 authors.

To edit the code, open it in Notepad (or any other program which edits code).

In the<namelists> section in the code, you will see the following section:

<listname="author"id="1">

<single_prefix></single_prefix>

<multi_prefix></multi_prefix>

<corporate>{%Corporate%}</corporate>

<first_person>{%Last% }{%First:a%}{%Middle:a%}</first_person>

<other_persons>{%Last% }{%First:a%}{%Middle:a%}</other_persons>

<separator_between_if_two>,</separator_between_if_two>

<separator_between_if_more_than_two>,</separator_between_if_more_than_two>

<separator_before_last>,</separator_before_last>

<max_number_of_persons_to_display>6</max_number_of_persons_to_display>

<number_of_persons_to_display_if_more_than_max>6</number_of_persons_to_display_if_more_than_max>

<overflow>, et al.</overflow>

<single_suffix></single_suffix>

<multi_suffix></multi_suffix>

</list>

All you have to do is change the >6< to >2< in both places. Be careful not to include any spaces, e.g. > 2<.

This should work, but coding can be fussy when you start editing it.

I hope this helps. As usual, no warranties are given, and any changes you do are at your own risk.

Kind regards,

Lionel Crator,

Tau Editing.

Professional Language Practitioner.

BL (Hons)(Rhod) LL.B (Rhod).

Member of The Professional Editors Group.

Working with words since 1981.

Cel 073 637 4516.

Fax 086 774 0622

From: andyfagan