Et al.

robyn.owens — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:37:00 GMT

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."

Robyn's Blog : Precision

Et al.