Problem with natbibapa and \shortcite

Question

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@article{c,
  author  = "Anne Author and Bert Buthor and Carla Cuthor",
  title   = "Final Thoughts",
  journal = "Circularity Today",
  year    = 3009,
  volume  = 9,
  number  = 10,
  pages   = "11--12",
}
\end{filecontents}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
\begin{document}
\citet{c} says something.

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document} 

In my thesis I need to cite the name and year of authors, so I use natbib. But for more than two authors, I wish that only first name is displayed followed by et.al. However since I use natbib, \shortcite cannot be used. Are there any other ways to overcome this problem?

Answer 1

The statement,

I need to cite the name and year of authors, so I use [the natbibapa option]

contains a non sequitur: One can easily create authoryear-style citation callouts without specifying the natbibapa option. Just use \citeA instead of \citet and \cite instead of \citep. See section 4.1, "The 'classic' apacite commands", of the user guide of the apacite package for more information.

With this setup, using \shortciteA and \shortcite to generate text-style and parenthetic-style citation call-outs with truncated author lists is no problem at all.

---

\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{mybib.bib}
@article{c,
  author  = "Anne Author and Bert Buthor and Carla Cuthor",
  title   = "Final Thoughts",
  journal = "Circularity Today",
  year    = 3009,
  volume  = 9,
  number  = 10,
  pages   = "11--12",
}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}

\begin{document}
\shortciteA{c} says something.
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}

Answer 2

It is a feature of APA style (6th edition, is which apacite implements) that lists of three to five authors are given in full on the first citation and only as first author + "et al." in subsequent citations.

For one-off occurrences apacite defines commands to override that such as \shortcite.

---

If you are using apacite with the natbibapa you are telling apacite to hand some control over the citation commands over to natbib, that means that some of the specialist citation commands apacite usually defines are not available any more. One of these is \shortcite.

The apacite documentation says (§4.2 Using natbib for citations, p. 15)

The full author list is obtained by adding a star after the command, for example, \citet*{key}. There is no separate command for the short author list, but it can be obtained with the construction \shortcites{key}\citet{key}.

So one option would be to say

\shortcites{c}\citet{c}

the first time you cite c. Subsequent citations will be abbreviated to first author + "et al." anyway. But of course that is extremely tedious, error-prone and overall doesn't feel right.

But the section from the apacite manual that we quoted above contains more information

With the natbibapa option, apacite loads natbib with the options longnamesfirst and sort.

So with natbibapa we get the long author list on first cite thanks to the option longnamesfirst. If we can turn off that option, we're back in business.

Unfortunately, natbib offers no interface to turn off this option. Once natbib is loaded with longnamesfirst there is no option to turn it back off. So we have to resort to internal commands. The option sets an internal boolean called NAT@longnames to true, so we set it to false.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
\makeatletter
\NAT@longnamesfalse
\makeatother

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{c,
  author  = {Anne Author and Bert Buthor and Carla Cuthor},
  title   = {Final Thoughts},
  journal = {Circularity Today},
  year    = 3009,
  volume  = 9,
  number  = 10,
  pages   = {11--12},
}
\end{filecontents}


\begin{document}
\citet{c} says something.

\citet{c} says something.

\bibliographystyle{apacite}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document} 

---

If you are looking for the answer to the same problem but without the option natbibapa (i.e. with apaciteclassic), the simplest answer I could find was to say

\let\cite\shortcite
\let\citeA\shortciteA
\let\citeNP\shortciteNP
\let\citeauthor\shortciteauthor
\let\citeauthorNP\shortciteauthorNP

\let\maskcite\maskshortcite
\let\maskciteA\maskshortciteA
\let\maskciteNP\maskshortciteNP
\let\maskciteauthor\maskshortciteauthor
\let\maskciteauthorNP\maskshortciteauthorNP