Within bibliographic references and contributor groupings, this element designates unnamed individuals (typically indicated in print with the text “et al.”).
Most journals model this as an EMPTY element, typically used to generate the text “et al.” from a stylesheet. However, a few journal DTDs (Blackwell’s, for example) expect content for this element, with such text as “Associates, coworkers, and colleagues”. Therefore (as of Version 2.3), this is an EMPTY element in the more prescriptive Publishing and Authoring Tag Sets and an element with textual contentment in the Archiving Tag Set. This Book Tag Set allows the <etal> element to be treated as empty, that is, the element has no content or to have textual content.
<!ELEMENT etal %etal-model; >
Any combination of:
In a bibliographic reference (punctuation and spacing removed):
...
<ref id="bid.1651">
<label>1</label>
<citation>
<person-group>
<name><surname>McKusick</surname>
<given-names>VA</given-names></name>
</person-group>
<etal>et al.</etal>
<source>Mendelian Inheritance in Man</source>
<edition>12th</edition>
<publisher-loc>Baltimore</publisher-loc>
<publisher-name>Johns Hopkins University Press</publisher-name>
<year>1998</year>
</citation>
</ref>
...
In a bibliographic reference (punctuation and spacing preserved):
...
<ref id="B26">
<label>26</label>
<citation>
<name><surname>Parker</surname>
<given-names>SG</given-names></name>,
<name><surname>Du</surname>
<given-names>X</given-names></name>,
<name><surname>Bardsley</surname>
<given-names>R</given-names></name>,
<etal>et al.</etal>
<article-title>Measuring outcomes in care of the
elderly</article-title>. <source>J R Coll Phys
Lond</source> <year>1994</year>;
<volume>28</volume>:
<fpage>428</fpage>–
<lpage>433</lpage>.
<pub-id pub-id-type="pmid">7807432</pub-id>.
</citation>
...
common.ent