Describe the issue or problem
We use the Citation Style Language Plugin. When choosing the Harvard format for showing the citation, if there are more than three authors, the author list should display only the name of the first author followed by “et al.”, but here, it does not. It only shows the name of the first author, but no “et al.”. So there appears to be only one author, even though there are multiple.
We have encountered this problem with several different journals on our OJS platform (see e.g. The Bryndum burial ground in Denmark: News on Viking Age women’s clothing | Archaeological Textiles Review or https://tidsskrift.dk/mona/article/view/165981). We have the same problem on our OMP platform (see e.g. Faste tværfaglige teams i ældreplejen: En minual til realisering af tværfaglige teams | Aarhus University).
If we find an article with only three (or less) authors, the citation is shown correctly when choosing harvard format: (see e.g.: https://tidsskrift.dk/ageculturehumanities/article/view/150067).
Steps I took leading up to the issue
- Go to ‘installed plugins’ and activate the plugin ‘Citation Style Language’
- Go to an article landing page with more than three authors (e.g. The Bryndum burial ground in Denmark: News on Viking Age women’s clothing | Archaeological Textiles Review)
- Go to the ‘How to Cite’ on the right side of the landing page and choose ‘Harvard’ in the ‘More Citation Formats’ drop down-menu.
- See there is only one author name shown in the citation, and no ‘et al.’.
What application are you using?
OJS 3.3.0-21 and OMP 3.4.0-7.
I can confirm this issue for OJS 3.5. See, for example,
https://doi.org/10.52905/hbph2026.112
and select Harvard.
Additionally, the citation is tagged with [Preprint], which is incorrect and does not appear in any other style. This is a standard journal article.
Since the journal’s citation style is Harvard, we would like to set this style as the default in the Citation Style Language plugin, but unfortunately, that is not possible given how it is currently displayed.
I was able to reproduce the issue of multiple authors, and it looks like this was an issue with the version of the citeproc-php library that we use in the plugin. We’ll aim to update this library for our next release of OJS 3.5 (3.5.0-5), which will resolve the issue upon upgrade.
@starbug So far I can’t reproduce the “[Preprint]” issue I see in your installation, but will investigate this further.
Hi @starbug, I investigated your issue and found that this is coming from the official CSL file from GitHub - citation-style-language/styles: Official repository for Citation Style Language (CSL) citation styles. · GitHub (harvard-cite-them-right.csl).
In the CSL style, it will add this “[Preprint]” element when the article does not have any page numbers or a volume number assigned to the containing Issue.
There are a couple of possible solutions:
- I can see in your journal that you have assigned volume numbers in the past, so if you do assign this issue a volume number then that won’t appear anymore.
- I see you have page numbers in the article PDF files, so another way to resolve this would be to enter those into your article metadata (and would be a general good metadata practice as well).
Hello @kaitlin , thank you very much for your help and for clarifying this matter. The journal switched to a continuous publication model in 2026. As a result, there are no longer any volumes or issues. The PDF file for each article starts with the number 1, since there is no complete edition and no page numbering for the HTML version. But I’ve added the page numbers to the PDF, and the CSL citation in Harvard style is now correct without [Preprint]. Let’s go with that. Sometimes life is that simple. Thanks again.