Is there a way to use “and” or “&” only if there are more than two names? At the moment, it seems to be possible to specify that the delimiter before “and / &” is only used if there are more than a certain number of names (with delimiter-precedes-last), but there does not seem to be an attribute for restricting the use of “and” to a least three names. Am I missing something?
No way to do that directly in CSL. It’s not much of an answer, but I suppose you could set the style up with and="symbol" and delimiter-precedes-last="always", and then do a find-and-replace (for , &) after stripping Zotero codes at the last stage of MS preparation. At present, at least, I think that’s the closest we could bring it.
What’s the use case here? I’ve never seen this and it seems like a very odd requirement for a style.
Well, it’s just a style I am editing for one department at my institution. In their guidelines they have the following requirement:
“Zwischen den einzelnen Autorinnen/Autoren einer Publikation wird ein „ ; “ gesetzt. Bei mehr als 2 Autorinnen/Autoren wird vor der letzten Autorin/dem letzten Autor ein „&“verwendet.”
(I can’t find the guidelines online, but I can send them to you via mail if you like)
Just to be clear: I don’t find that really useful as well, and I have already suggested that they should either always use “&” before the last name. But like in the other thread, it is not my decision.
And that’s actually implemented like that (e.g. in the examples) or is it just sloppy writing (which we see a lot of in de-facto homemade citation guidelines)?
I completely agree that we can’t be overly normative in what we include in CSL, but I’m also not willing to introduce CSL features because some professor somewhere came up with a rule. Whether there’s some sort of logic behind a rule is often (though admittedly not always) a good way to see whether there are likely going to be other instances of a requirement.
Yes. It is really implemented this way. I can send you the guidelines if you send me your mail via pm.
The style is actually based on APA, but this is one of the cases where they explicitly asked me to implement a different behaviour. So I don’t think this is some misunderstanding here.
Yeah, unless we see more examples of this, I don’t think we’ll try to support it.