How to show all the names of three or less authors in text?

Question

I am using the article document class and the natbib package. When I cite 3 or more authors, this is shown as FirstAuthor et al. I want to change this such that when I have one, two or three authors, all their names are shown in text, while if I have 4 or more authors, this would then be shown as FirstAuthor et al.

Is there a simple way to change the truncation of authors?

Answer 1

I suggest you use biblatex with these options:

\usepackage[natbib, maxcitenames=3, mincitenames=11, style=apa]{biblatex}

The natbib option is for compatibility with natbib commands.

Note the default backend for biblatex is biber. You may specify in the options backend=bibtex but you'll lose some functionalities.

Answer 2

You would like to print the full author list, thus use citations with star *, such as \citet*, citep* under the package natbib. See below for more info.

\citet     #textual citations, print the abbreviated author list
\citet*    #textual citations, print the full author list

\citep     #parenthetical citations, print the abbreviated author list
\citep*    #parenthetical citations, print the full author list

\citealt    #the same as \citet but without any parentheses.
\citealp    #the same as \citep but without any parentheses. 

Answer 3

Try to use these command: \citet*{} or \citep*{} and for more extended citation you can use \citealt*{} or\citealp*{}.

According to natbib documentation, these commands show all authors and not just the abbreviated one

Natbib Documentation