RogBlog

I publish in a number of journals that use the rules of APA style.  I prefer to write my papers in LaTeX, and to use BibTeX together natbib to manage citations and bibliographic references.  One of the rules of APA style says that the first citation of a bibliographic reference must be the “long” citation (all authors listed, up to five).  Natbib has a longnamesfirst option that is supposed to do this automatically, but two of the most popular natbib style files — apalike and newapa — silently fail to use the option.

The solution is to use the apacite style file. It works. That is, you should have the following line in your preamble:

\usepackage[longnamesfirst]{natbib}

and the following line before you use the \bibliography command:

\bibliographystyle{apacite}