BibTeX author names

Articles with more than three or four authors present may present something of a bibliographic challenge. Consider "Association of polymorphisms in the CRP gene with circulating C-reactive protein levels and cardiovascular events" in JAMA 296(22). The article features 15 separate authors on the first page. But the coversheet JAMA provides at the front of the PDF provides only the first three authors plus 'et al.' for purposes of citation.

How to get BibTeX to play along?

The short answer:

@Article{ Lange:2006,
   title = "Association of polymorphisms ...",
   author = "Lange, Leslie A. and 
             Carlson, Christopher S. and 
             Hindorff, Lucia A. 
             and others",
   journal = "Journal of the American Medical Association",
   year = "2006",
   volume = "296",
   number = "22",
   pages = "2703--2711"
}

APA-style BibTeX output looks like this:

[Lange et al., 2006] Lange, L. A., Carlson, C. S., Hindorff,
   L. A., et al. (2006). Association of polymorphisms in the
   CRP gene with circulating C-reactive protein levels and
   cardiovascular events. Journal of the American Medical
   Association, 296(22):2703–2711.

Two tricks here.

First, the BibTeX author field only ever comprises a single string enclosed in double quotes. But note that the BibTeX author field may comprise arbitrarily many authors delimited by 'and'.

Second, the BibTeX author field recognizes the special phrase 'and others' as a directive to append 'et al.' to the end of the list of named authors in the bibliography. This matters because this would appear to be the only way to get BibTeX to list the names of only 3 of 15 authors of an article, with the 12 unnamed authors given only as 'et al.'.