Q. A paper includes the following references:
Tawiah, Vincent, Ernest Gyapong, and Muhammad Usman. 2024. “Returnee Directors and Green Innovation.” Journal of Business Research 174 (March): 114369.
Tawiah, Vincent, Ernest Gyapong, and Yan Wang. 2024. “Does Board Ethnic Diversity Affect IFRS Disclosures?” Journal of Accounting Literature, ahead of print, September 24.
Tawiah, Vincent, Reon Matemane, Babajide Oyewo, and Tesfaye T. Lemma. 2024. “Saving the Environment with Indigenous Directors: Evidence from Africa.” Business Strategy and the Environment 33 (3): 2445–61.
Tawiah, Vincent, Abdulrasheed Zakari, and Rafael Alvarado. 2024. “Effect of Corruption on Green Growth.” Environment, Development and Sustainability 26 (4): 10429–59.
Should I still cite the first two references in the text as first author, second author, et al. YEAR (e.g., Tawiah, Gyapong, et al. 2024), even though only one author is not mentioned and so “et al.” doesn’t seem appropriate?
A. It would be nice if et al. (a Latin abbreviation meaning “and others”) could be used to refer to just one person, but it’s plural, and there’s no suitable alternative abbreviation for the singular.
In your situation—where you are obligated to include more than one name in your parenthetical author-date text references to distinguish between different works published in the same year by the same first-listed author but with different coauthors (otherwise, “Tawiah et al.” would suffice)—you have no choice but to include all three authors when citing any of the three sources by exactly three authors.
But you can still use et al. for the source by four authors (the article in Business Strategy and the Environment), where it would stand in for the names of the third and fourth authors (Oyewo and Lemma):
(Tawiah, Gyapong, and Usman 2024)
(Tawiah, Gyapong, and Wang 2024)
(Tawiah, Zakari, and Alvarado 2024)
but
(Tawiah, Matemane, et al. 2024)
Note that you’d need to list all three authors for the first two examples no matter what—because the first two authors are the same for both. It’s the third example (with coauthors Zakari and Alvarado) that requires all three names simply because et al. must refer to more than one person.
For some additional considerations (including the option to use a short title to differentiate such sources in text references, which would allow you to cite “Tawiah et al.” for all four of your sources), see CMOS 13.123. For the article ID in place of page numbers in the “Returnee Directors” citation, see CMOS 14.71. For the meaning of “ahead of print” in the Accounting Literature example, see CMOS 14.75.