How do you change APA citations to show "et al"

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kazza
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Kazza

Having the APA function in MS word is fantastic.
But APA style is pretty strict when it comes to citations.

If you are citing a bunch of authors (3 or more authors), you HAVE to show
all the authors in the very first instance of your citation. EG. (Smith,
Wood & Black, 2009).

But every other instance of citing these authors, you HAVE to condense the
citation to Smith et al., 2009. (if you show all 3 authors' names again,
you're not following APA style).

Soooo, how do you activate this "et al" function in MS Word? I can't seem to
find any options anywhere, but i'm obviously not looking in the right spot.

Any help would be awesome!

Thanks!
 
Don't overestimate the Word bibliography tool.

It was released long before it was ready to use.

How do you feel about the spaces before the commas in the bibliography
entries it makes in APA?

Just be glad you're not using Chicago style, which is seriously
broken.
 
Unfortunately this is not possible in Word 2007.

In-text citations are not automatically aware of any previous use of the
same source and there is no flag available to indicate such a thing by hand.
So all occurences of a citation of a specific source result in the same
output.

Yves
 
It is possible. It's just a question of changing the style. Go to the references and change the style to either APA sixth edition (et al, from 4 authors or higher) or Harvard-Anglia (almost the same, and et al. from 3 or more authors.
 
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