This is possibly a very obscure problem. I tried searching for solutions but I had a hard time getting search engines to accept a literal ", &" string.
The problem is basically this. I'm using natbib with round and authoryear options. I'm using the citation style of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (mn2e.bst), which says the first reference to a three-author paper must display all three names in full on the first citation and "et al." thereafter. So, if I make two citations to a paper by Smith, Jones and Parker, the first citation should be "Smith, Jones & Parker (2012)" and the second should be "Smith et al. (2012)".
This means the first citation should use the citet*. But then the output is
Smith, Jones, & Parker (2012)
which is just plain wrong. My sysadmins are allergic to updating (I'm on RHEL 5, writing this in FF3.6...) so I've got an old version of natbib. I tried playing with the punctuation with \bibpunct but I couldn't remove the correct comma. I realise this is basically the same as the standard formats (e.g. plainnat) writing "and" instead of "&" so I guess I'm asking how to remove that Oxford comma.
As required, here's a minimal example.
eg.tex
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[authoryear]{natbib}
\begin{document}
\citet*{sjp12}
\bibliographystyle{mn2e}
\bibliography{eg}
\end{document}
eg.bib
@ARTICLE{sjp12,
author = {{Smith}, A. and {Jones}, B. and {Parker}, C.},
title = "{A paper title}",
journal = {Journal of Amazing Science},
keywords = {natbib},
year = 2012,
month = feb,
volume = 314,
pages = {159}
}
