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Depending on your particular reference style, eXtyles NLM Bibliographic Processing may be set to truncate a list of contributors after a certain number, followed by some text like "et al." or "and others". This added text is styled using the bib_etal character style. Note that the XML contains only the empty <etal/> element, not the contents of the bib_etal-styled text.

bib_year

The bib_year character style is applied to the year of publication. This style should be applied to all references that have an identifiable publication year, not just journal articles. In name-date citation styles, it is critical that the publication year is correctly styled for each reference, in order for the Citation Matching process to successfully mark all bibliographic citations. Also, in name-date citation styles, note that letters used to distinguish otherwise identically cited articles (such as "Smith, 2001a, b") will also be styled with the bib_year character style.

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