How to omit NON-consecutive repeated authors and differing et al. authors?

[I’ve searched the forum, and can’t find what I’m looking for - if someone can point me to an existing post(s), I’d appreciate it.]

Problem 1:  I need to have in-text citations in chronological order AND omit a repeated author’s name.  My group of citations includes two works by the same author, but his works are separated in time by the work of another author, and I cannot figure out how to list the citations chronologically and simultaneously group the two works by the same author.  I’ve tried setting the sort order for citations in the journal’s style to “Year + Author” and just “Year”, but neither gets me the result I desire.  Here are examples:

What I’m getting:  (Tom et al., 1979; Dick, 1981; Harry et al., 1987; Dick, 2000)

What I want:  (Tom et al., 1979; Dick, 1981, 2000; Harry et al., 1987)

Problem 2: I have my style for citations set up to separate repeated author citations with “,” but this is not working in the case of an author with two different “et al.” author lists.  For example:

What I’m getting: (Smith et al., 1999; Smith et al., 2000) [where Smith worked with two different groups of people]

What I want: (Smith et al., 1999, 2000)

Thanks! 

Message Edited by sandrift on 09-08-2009 11:58 AM

Message Edited by sandrift on 09-08-2009 11:59 AM

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1.  You would need to sort citations as Author+Year to get the references to sort together, but then you will get (Dick, 1981, 2000; Harry et al., 1987; Tom et al., 1979).  Perhaps you would be safest to not sort and put them in the citation in the order you want them to appear. 

2.  I can’t get that to work either.  But do any journals demand that?

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It looks like I have to do both of these manually. *sigh*

Yes, unfortunately, I have one journal in the geosciences that is requiring both of these.  With respect to #2, it is standard in the geosciences (at least in my field) to group “et al.” citations having the same first author (you can’t tell the difference in the in-text citation anyway, so why distinguish?).

Thanks for taking a look at this - I opened a support case with ThomsonReuters over a week ago and have received no response at all. 

Another trick is to add the second year as a suffix to the first’s citation, and then to hide both year and author for the other. 

For the second, you can just manually hide the authors for the subsequent papers, but you might not get the correct separating punctuation then. 

I am a firm believer in - give it to them as close as feasibly possible and if they really care, the editorial staff will fix it.  I have never had a editor come back and reject my paper because of these kind of small issues! (and if it really bothers me, I just make a note to fix those before sending the manuscript in.)