Et al.

Published 22 June 07 09:37 PM | robyn.owens 

Et al. is an abbreviation for et alius which means "and another" or et alii which means "and others." Because it is an abbreviation, there is no period after "et" but there is after "al." Et al. is commonly used in citation (the practice in scholarly writing of referring to others' work) but never in referencing (the compilation at the end of a piece of scholarly writing that gives a full list of bibliographic details associated with the works cited in the text).

The convention in citation is that all authors up to three are listed in full, however, if there are four or more authors then one uses et al. by citing only the first author followed by "et al." In this case "al." is always an abbreviation of "alii", meaning "others". Thus:

Smith and Jones (2003) claim that Indian princesses had no power.

Bloggs, Lin and Kolmogorov (1904) computed e to 100,000 places.

Brown et al. (1997) first observed the 27 moons of the planet Krypton.

Unfortunately, if the paper by Brown et al. has 15 authors, all 15 must be listed in full in the reference. If you (J. R. Black) are the second author on this paper, you can not cite by saying "Brown, Black et al."

 

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# Sanna said on June 22, 2007 10:56 PM:

On the topic of multiple authors - how is the order of authors determined? I guess it's more of an issue in the sciences, but it does happen in the arts as well. Who goes first? What's the difference between a fifth and a sixth author? To whay extent is authorsip divvied according to "who did the bulk of the work" and "whose name will get it published"?

# robyn.owens said on June 23, 2007 9:22 PM:

The general convention is that the first author is the primary author, that is usually the one who did the most work, including most of the writing. I have heard claims that there are some journals that insist on authors being listed alphabetically by family name, but I've never come across any myself. Because of the et al. convention, it's usually good to be the first author because then it's your name that gets cited in the text. In some fields it is the "senior" author who gets the last position. The senior author is generally the "boss of the lab", the big shot professor, the one who is responsible for all the funding etc. However, this on its own is not enough to ensure authorship. UWA's guidelines on authorship are as follows:

Minimum requirement for authorship should accord with the 'Vancouver Protocol' as set out in the fifth edition of the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Authorship is substantial participation, where all the following conditions are met:

   * conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data;

   * drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;

   * final approval of the version to be published.

Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusion must be the responsibility of at least one author. An author's role in a research output must be sufficient for that person to take responsibility for at least that part of the output in that person's area of expertise. No person who is an author, consistent with this definition, must be excluded as an author without their permission in writing.

Generally, the first author becomes the corresponding author as well.

However, to answer your original question, in a list of 15 authors, I've no idea how they decide who goes fifth and who goes sixth, but I believe there are papers written on the topic. I'll see what I can find.

# sky said on June 24, 2007 9:31 AM:

Apparently the possibility for a joke is sometimes the deciding factor, as in 'the alphabetical article': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpher-Bethe-Gamow_theory

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About robyn.owens

I started my academic life doing a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics at UWA before going to Oxford to complete an MSc and a DPhil, also in Mathematics. I then spent three years in Paris at l'Université de Paris-Sud, Orsay, continuing research in mathematical analysis and going to lots of movies before returning to UWA to work as a research mathematician. I have lectured in Maths and Computer Science at UWA, as well as for short periods at Berkeley, The University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and Prince Songkla University in Thailand. My research has focussed on computer vision, including feature detection in images, 3D shape measurement, image understanding, and representation.