BibTeX has a strict syntax for lists of authors’ (or editors’) names in the BibTeX data file; if you write the list of names in a “natural”-seeming way, the chances are you will confuse BibTeX, and the output produced will be quite different from what you had hoped.
Names should be expressed in one of the forms
and lists of names should be separated with “and”. For example:First Last Last, First Last, Suffix, First
AUTHOR = {Fred Q. Bloggs, John P. Doe \&
Another Idiot}
falls foul of two of the above rules: a syntactically significant
comma appears in an incorrect place, and ‘\&’ is being used as a
name separator. The output of the above might be something like:
because “John P. Doe & Another Idiot has become the ‘first name’, while “Fred Q. Bloggs” has become the ‘last name’ of a single person. The example should have been written:John P. Doe \& Another Idiot Fred Q. Bloggs
AUTHOR = {Fred Q. Bloggs and John P. Doe and
Another Idiot}
Some bibliography styles implement clever acrobatics with very long
author lists. You can force truncation by using the pseudo-name
“others”, which will usually translate to something like
“et al” in the typeset output. So, if Mr. Bloggs wanted to
distract attention from his co-authors, he would write:
AUTHOR = {Fred Q. Bloggs and others}
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=manyauthor