When using in-text citations in APA, "et al." is not automatically applied. Is there a fix for that? (.md to .docx/.odt)

[netgrims]

When I convert something from markdown to .docx or .odt using Pandoc, in-text citations with long lists of authors do not get reduced to "et al." in APA.

For example:
"As @johnston.etal_2018 note, the quantumfurburation of dichophibs is of a sub-rimodal nature."
becomes:
"As Johnston, Wellesley, Lundt, Graeve, and Philips (2018) note, the quantumfurburation of dichophibs is of a sub-rimodal nature."
while it should be:
"As Johnston et al. (2018) note, the quantumfurburation of dichophibs is of a sub-rimodal nature."

Is there some way to get around this? Is it a bug? Am I doing something wrong? Or is it an issue of Citeproc rather than Pandoc?

PS. Just to be clear, it does work when citing in brackets, e.g. [@johnston.etal_2018] becomes (Johnston et al. 2018)

[iandol]

Not what I see (apa.csl is the latest version from Zotero styles https://www.zotero.org/styles?q=apa V7):

➪ pandoc --citeproc --bibliography CoreFast.json --csl apa.csl --verbose -t plain

It was shown by @wang2025 that this was clear [@wang2025]. Wang [-@wang2025] said this.

------------------

[INFO] Running filter citeproc
[INFO] Loaded apa.csl from /Users/ian/.local/share/pandoc/csl/apa.csl
[INFO] Loaded CoreFast.json from CoreFast.json
[INFO] Completed filter citeproc in 318 ms

---------------------
It was shown by Wang et al. (2025) that this was clear (Wang et al.,
2025). Wang (2025) said this.

Wang, G., Li, J., Sun, Y., Chen, X., Liu, C., Wu, Y., Lu, M., Song, S.,
& Yadkori, Y. A. (2025). Hierarchical Reasoning Model. cs.AI.
http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21734v2

[iandol]

Maybe it is due to an author collision — https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/in_text_citations_author_authors.html —

If you’re citing multiple works with similar groups of authors, and the shortened “et al” citation form of each source would be the same, you’ll need to avoid ambiguity by writing out more names. If you cited works with these authors:

Jones, Smith, Liu, Huang, and Kim (2020)
Jones, Smith, Ruiz, Wang, and Stanton (2020)

[netgrims]

Okay, I've tried it again after downloading a new .csl file, and adding a yaml header that explicitly mentions APA (I'm using Pandoc built into Zettlr with a Lua-filter for Zotero live citations), and it is doing what it should now.

I don't think it had anything to do with author collision, as it was happening consistently.

Thanks for the advice!

[iandol]

OK good, note that for author collisions you can still control the method used, on line 2087 of apa.csl are the disambiguation rules it uses:

https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/apa.csl#L2087

It personally annoyed me that apa.csl used added author initials for disambiguation when I think it should use more author names, and in fact this can be changed, I set disambiguate-add-givenname="false" and it now works as I prefer:

https://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#disambiguation

pandoc --citeproc --bibliography CoreFast.json -t plain --csl apa.csl --verbose

Is was shown by @wang2025 that this was clear [@wang2025]. Wang [-@wang2025] said this. See also [@wang2025a].

-------------------

[INFO] Running filter citeproc
[INFO] Loaded apa.csl from /Users/ian/.local/share/pandoc/csl/apa.csl
[INFO] Loaded CoreFast.json from CoreFast.json
[INFO] Completed filter citeproc in 331 ms

------------------------

Is was shown by Wang, Li, et al. (2025) that this was clear (Wang, Li,
et al., 2025). Wang (2025) said this. See also (Wang, Fahey, et al.,
2025).

Wang, E. Y., Fahey, P. G., Ding, Z., Papadopoulos, S., Ponder, K., Weis,
M. A., Chang, A., Muhammad, T., Patel, S., Ding, Z., Tran, D., Fu, J.,
Schneider-Mizell, C. M., MICrONS, C., da Costa, N. M., Reid, R. C.,
Collman, F., da Costa, N. M., Franke, K., … Tolias, A. S. (2025).
Foundation model of neural activity predicts response to new stimulus
types. Nature, 640(8058), 470–477. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08829-y

Wang, G., Li, J., Sun, Y., Chen, X., Liu, C., Wu, Y., Lu, M., Song, S.,
& Yadkori, Y. A. (2025). Hierarchical Reasoning Model. cs.AI. http://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21734v2