Expanding only one author list when citing multiple papers with Natbib

Question

I have a question about citing multiple authors, but only printing the full author list for one of the papers. I have a situation where I want to cite two papers in the same set of parenthesis, but I only want to expand the set of authors in one of the papers. I am using the Natbib and Bibtex packages. The set up is as follows:

paper1: 4 authors; paper2: 3 authors (the standard in my field is to expand 3 author papers on the first citation)

\citep*[see][for review]{paper1,paper2}

The problem I am having is that this command expands both author lists into the long citation. I know I could use the option [longnamefirst] in my natbib package declaration, but I only want to expand 3 author papers on the first citation, not all papers.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

I don't think you can do it with natbib out of the box. You probably need to build your own citation command, e.g.,

\newcommand{\citefirstfull}[2]{
   (\citealt*{#1}; \citealt{#2})
}

called with

\citefirstfull{paper1}{paper2}

That's not really a good solution, though since you cannot, e.g., exchange the order of the papers (you would need an own command with reversed order).

Have you looked at apacite.sty? It determines by itself when you cite a paper for the first time and when it has to expand. However, it is adapted to the requirements by the APA, the american psychological association but maybe they are similar enough to your field to be useful?

If nothing helps (and before spending two weeks tweaking this problem), I usually insert the papers into the bibliography with

\nocite{paper1,paper2}

and spell out the reference in the text "by hand"...