Citing authors in your blog post is important to prove to your readers that the research you conducted on the search engines was absolutely thorough. More so, citing the original authors also displays your honesty and how responsible you are as a scholar. Citing authors helps you to avoid plagiarism because you are acknowledging the ideas that were previously used by the authors. When you are citing the authors, you are also letting your readers look through the sources.
While citing sources and writers is easy, you might not be aware of how to cite multiple authors in your blog post. Let’s understand how to do it with an ace here.
Citing Multiple Authors in Your Blog Post: Doing it The Right Way
1. Citing 2 Authors
When a work consists of 2 writers, whether it is a parenthetical citation or narrative citation, in all the in-text citations you must add the last names of the freelance writers.
While for the parenthetical citation, you must use (&) between the last names of the writers.
Parenthetical Citation for 2 Writers
(Writer 1 & Writer 2, Published Year)
Narrative Citation for 2 Writers
Writer 1 and Writer 2 (Published Year)
2. Citing 3 or More Authors
When they’re 3 or more writers for a paper, consider including the first author’s last name followed by “et al”, which translates and others. No wonder why ‘et all’ is used as an alternative for more than 2 last names of the writers. This will help your content to come out clean in the plagiarism scanner.
Parenthetical citation for 3 or more writers:
(Author 1 et al, Published Year)
Narrative citation for 3 or more writers:
Author 1 et al. (Published Year)
3. Citing 6+ Authors
Just add the last name of the first author and add ‘et al’ followed with the publication year. If you come across a source citation for this already, then you can try and skip the publication year. This will prevent the writing from becoming a duplicated content.
4. Citing Group Authors
The in-text citation rules are suitable when the source authors are either an organization like for instance a government agency, hospital, study group, an NGO group. To learn if an individual writer wrote the reference or a group wrote it, you can look at the title page or even the cover page of the original content. And you can always use an online plagiarism checker to keep your content free of plagiarism issues.
Get the abbreviation spelled out and think of getting the group defined once in the initial paragraph of the text before you use an abbreviated group name as your citation author. You can then use the group abbreviation name all through the paper.
Prevention Tips for In-Text Citation Ambiguity
The in-text citations can at times include more than 3 authors, a lot of whose last names are similar, and similar published year. This might appear like they include similar reference lists when you are adding et al abbreviation. There are ways to prevent this ambiguity. For in-text citation, write as many names as you can until the references look different before you abbreviate other names of the authors with the abbreviation- ‘et al’.
These were some of the basic tips for those who were confused as to how to cite multiple authors in their blog posts. Cite the multiple authors in this way and avoid facing plagiarism issues from plagiarism scanner tools and turn your writing into unique content.