When authoryear-style and author-number citation call-outs are in use, the user guide of the natbib
package (cf. page 9, lower half) expressly discourages the use of \citet
with multiple arguments. An exception to this stricture -- not stated explicitly in the package's user guide but pretty much self-evident from the context -- occurs if the pieces being cited all have the same author(s). However, this exception doesn't apply to the example you've provided, does it?
The stricture against using \citet
with multiple arguments does not apply to \citep
, by the way. I.e., it's perfectly OK to use \citep
with multiple arguments.
Especially if you're citing a multitude of pieces in support of or against some argument of claim, you should give strong preference to the \citep
variant. To wit, one should never even contemplate writing something such as
Jones (1999), Miller (2000), Smith (2002), Strickland (2001) and Zwicki (1915) have all argued that ...
In English-language (and in many other languages too, I suppose) documents, a sentence that features a multi-part subject noun is bound to exhaust and/or distract readers unnecessarily. Do you want to risk committing this offense?
Back to your example: Writing \citet{maddison-cct,ridley-comparative}
is simply bad and/or lazy. To assure a proper grammatical sentence structure, you should write either
\citet{maddison-cct} and \citet{ridley-comparative} have argued that ...
or choose the \citep
approach, i.e., write something like
... is the main argument \citep[cf.][]{maddison-cct,ridley-comparative}.
\bibpunct
command? This will only work with the case of two citations, since it sets the separator between citations in a list. So for more than 2 it will yieldx1 [1] and x2[2] and x3 [3] ... and xn [n]
which is undesireable.etextools
, which has nice list processing abilities (extending that ofetoolbox
). I can't install them on the computer I am using now; maybe I'll take a look later.\csvloop!
to extract the list length, if it is more than 1 you can extract and delete the last element from the csvlist, process the rest using\citet
, add the word "and", and process the remaining item using\citet
.)