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My questions regards the format of citation. For the context: I am a student, presenting my work (with slides) and referring to the publications in which I am co-author (never in the first three authors).

It would be nice for my name to explicitely appear, as I also refer to other publications in which I did not take part.However I do not want to list all the authors (more than 10 for some papers).

Should I use (recommendeed by my advisor):

A.Smith, M.Myself et al. "Marvelous publication"

Or

A.Smith et al. (including M.Myself), "Marvelous publication"

My concern is not to appear as being the second author, which would feel like a lie, while keeping a compact formatting.

Is there a common way of doing this ?

Thank you.

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  • 3
    Including your academic field might be helpful. – chrylis -on strike- Jun 7 '18 at 15:16
  • 4
    I have often seen "A. Smith, ..., M. Myself, et al. 2018, Nature" – rhombidodecahedron Jun 12 '18 at 18:41
  • 1
    I hope you presented this choice to your advisor and your reasons for not preferring option A. If he/she still thinks it is advisable for your field it probably is, unless your advisor is relatively inexperienced. – Buffy Sep 20 '18 at 13:54
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For a presentation I would use @Jan Kukacka's answer. Say in the presentation "This work was published in our 2015 paper".

For a resume you've four options as I see it:

  • List all the authors (put yourself in bold).
  • List the first x authors (where 10 is a common value of x) then put et al (several journals/funding bodies use this format). Choose x so your name always appears
  • List all the authors up to and including your name, and then put et al.
  • List just the first author. As the papers will probably appear in a publications section on your resume, its fairly clear that you are going to be an author.

Which ever you choose, it might be worth including a very short sentence that described your role in the work.

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21

I was recently facing the same struggle. For the purpose of a resume, I decided to write the full list of authors.

A presentation is a bit different matter: it does not give you so much space for text, but you can say a lot more. In this case, I would refer to the papers on the slides the usual way:

First Author et al., 2015: Marvelous publication,

potentially mentioning in the spoken narrative that you are one of the co-authors (since your question gives a hint that this is a part of the message you want to deliver), and possibly including a slide with the full reference list to the end of the presentation (which you won't use during the actual talk but is handy for anyone looking at the slides later).

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    Yeah in a presentation you can say "... this was published in our 2015 pulblication "A treatise on why the fourth author is wonderful". – Ian Sudbery Jun 7 '18 at 8:48
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Another option is to omit the authors between the first author and your position:

First Author, [...], Your Name, et al., 2015: Marvelous publication`

But I would only recommend this in scenarios where it is important to highlight your participation to these publications, e.g. reports for your PhD progress or similar.

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I just put 'co-author' of. Sometimes people care about which co-author, such as "Second co-author' of. This is for a non-academic job, and when the employer just wants to know you published. However, if they actually would probably care about the published work, cite it as a reference, just like the answers above.

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I sticked to the Smith et al. scheme but used a different text color for papers I co-authored together with an explanatory sentence at the beginning.

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