Insert a "XXXX et al." citation.

Before everything, thank you so much for this wonderful plugin ! It’s a joy to use !

What is proposed

To make it even more flexible, I’d love to be able to add a proper XXXX *et al.*, YYYY citation type in Markdown format. This is in the particular case of wanting your markdown notes to be properly formatted without being parsed by pandoc.

In Markdown, this would look like:

As it is said by [Test *et al.*, 2018](link/to/paper), blablabla

Rendered, it would look like:

As it is said by Test et al., 2018, blablabla

As of today, the plugin is already almost capable of doing this, using an extremely convoluted handlebars sentence:

[{{#each entry.author}}{{#if @first}}{{#if this.family}}{{this.family}}{{#unless @last}} *et al.*{{/unless}}{{else}}{{../authorString}}{{/if}}{{/if}}{{/each}}, {{#if year}}{{year}}{{else}}no date{{/if}}]({{zoteroSelectURI}})

What the sentence does is to:

1. Display the family name of the first author (if it has one)
2. Add “et al.” next to it if this first author if it is not the last author of the list of authors (if not, write nothing since there’s no other authors)
3. If the author has no family name or given name (which happens when it’s an organization with only one name), I can’t get the name of the author via this.given or this.family; so, the sentence writes the authorString in full (not ideal)
4. If there is a year, add it.
5. As a link, add the zotero select URI (my personal preference; can be replaced by the DOI URL via https://doi.org/{{DOI}} or other URL)

It works pretty well, but it seems a bit complex for most users. It took me a lot of time myself 😄 !

What is needed

Ideally, I imagine that allowing the use of a csl file to custom the appearance of this citation would be ideal; but it would require a lot of work.

Using this type of long handlebar syntax could be good, but needs to be explained to the users properly; maybe this example could be given ?

If it is given, it could be nice to think of a way to replace the authorString in case the name of the author cannot be gathered via this.given or this.family. If you have a pointer for that, I’d be much obliged.

Thanks again for your work !