Science Memes

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Becoming et al. (mander.xyz)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 months ago (13 children)

From what I can tell, et al. is not about socio-political power*. It's just a necessity for ease and efficiency. In-text citations need to be short to limit wasted space. Otherwise, we'd have lots of text dedicated to unnecessary names. An in-text citation that reads (Perez et al., 2023) is much more efficient than (Perez, Washington, Smith, Iwukuni, Johnson, Patel, Boofy, Yamirez, Tate, Hendrix, Apple, Man, & Gargamel, 2023).

Using 7th ed. APA, the citation entries in the bibliography/references include upto the first 20 authors, so contributors are rarely omitted.

Perhaps being the first author is in many situations, but APA format can't really address that.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (10 children)

It's not like these are written on literal paper. It's the 21st century, There's no reason to save space in digital documents when you can just format them differently.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Yeah I imagine they could have some sort of click to expand functionality

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

~~Literally even a spot bumped out on the end where they list everyone, at the very end of the paper, would be infinitely better than "et Al"~~

Uhhhhhh

Yeah I have no defense for this other than having a dumb moment.

Carry on... ^please^

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

That's what bibliography is. It's already like that, or am I missing something?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It sounds like you're talking about the references, which already list all authors

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Then what's the issue? Sounds to me like papers already have comprehensive credits.

Is the issue that it's displayed in two places, so people don't bother to check out the second?

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