Combining citations for two different sets of authors with Natbib when they share a common lead author

Question

I use natbib and bibtex. I have 2 different articles as follows:

Article 1- Written by authors A, B, C, and D in year 2000.
Article 2- Written by authors A, C, E, and G in year 2003.

I want to refer to these 2 articles in the text. I would say something like A et al. (2000, 2003) but I know that is not precise since technically they are 2 different sets of authors. In reality, I only care about referencing the first author in something like Author A and collagues in 2000 and 2003. However, because I use hyperreferencing, natbib, and bibtex, I still want it to be the case that when I click on the 2000 in the .pdf, it takes me to the bibliographic information in the reference section for the 2000 article and the same with the 2003 one.

I use natbib. Any suggestions?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I'm assuming that you've set up the bib entries in question along the following lines:

@article{ABCD:2000,
    author = "Andersen, A. and B. Beckham and C. Christiansen and D. Dawkins",
    year = 2000,
    ...
}
@article{ACEG:2003,
    author = "Andersen, A. and C. Christiansen and E. Eglund and G. Gustafsson",
    year = 2003,
    ...
}

If you cite these entries using natbib's \citet command, as in

\citet{ABCD:2000,ACEG:2003)

you would indeed get something like

Andersen et al. (2000, 2003)

I'd venture the guess that the risk of creating the impression among your readers that all co-authors of A. Andersen in both publications are the same is rather minimal. However, if you think the risk is non-negligible, you could take one or more of the following measures.

• You could use the variant citation command \citet*, which will print the full list of authors' surnames.

• You could load the natbib package with the longnamesfirst option. That way, the first time you cite these two entries, the full list rather than the abbreviated list of surnames will be generated automatically when you use \citet or \citep on these entries.

• If that's still not enough, you could define "citation aliases", as in

  \defcitetalias{ABCD:2000}{ABCD}
  \defcitetalias{ACEG:2003}{ACEG}
  

  The citation command \citetalias{ABCD:2000,ACEG:2003} will then generate ABCD, ACEG. By the way, when using citation aliases, it's usually a good idea to introduce them explicitly, as in

  ...as argued by `\citet*{ABCD:2000}, hereafter abbreviated as \citetalias{ABCD:2000}, ...