On Sat, 2004-10-30 at 10:55, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> There isn't any coding that I know of for et al, because it only makes
> sense when you have a list of authors, not individual authors.
> Yes, this doesn't belong in the metadata.
It sure does belong. It's the only way you know that the author list is
not complete. Yes, you can code for that rather than actually entering
"et al", but it's a key piece of info.
> Every output style has
> different rules. I'd go through the trouble of tacking down the full
> author list if it wasn't listed probably.
Track them down? Well, do you really want them? There are articles in
the scientific areas, particularly biological sciences, that can have as
many as one hundred "authors" listed. Yep, one hundred, count 'em. We
had to code to quit indexing them after 90 because we wanted to leave
room in our indexes for other data. This is because it is a common
practice in those sciences to acknowledge everyone who contributed to
the results, not just those who were principal investigators. Yeah, it
would be great if all of them were listed in indexes, but you're going
to run into "et al" fairly often, especially in older data where there
were more technological limitations.
--
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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