How to reduce long author lists to "Firstauthor et al." in jabref in-text citation?

Question

I have connected libreoffice to jabref. However, whenever i try to put an in-text citation, it does not come as first_author_et_al. but rather as a long list of authors.

For example the citation for a research paper comes as [Azmana,Mahmood,Hilles,Rahman,Arifin & Ahmed 2021] rather than [Azmana et al.]

I tried reducing the list of authors to first author et al. but it does not solve the problem. I have no idea as to what should i do. Please help.

Answer 1

I just came across the same problem and found your post. I think this may be a new behavior (I didn't have that issue the last time I did a bibliography, with a previous JabRef version).

I noticed a new MaxAuthorsFirst in jstyle files, that I didn't have. Adding it solved the problem for me. More specifically in the CITATION section of my jstyle doc, I used to only have the line MaxAuthors=2 - I added a new line MaxAuthorsFirst=2 (looks like the default JabRef behavior now may be to list all authors the first time and this key controls that behavior). See examples at https://jstyles.jabref.org/.