I'm trying to create a CSL style to automate my citations for research papers (and lab reports). My department has decided that other places make citations too complicated, so they have created their own style that students have to use. One of the requirements for this style is that "et al." must be italicized. However, I can't seem to get CSL to do that. Is this at all possible? [X-posted from Academia]
Yes it is, see http://docs.citationstyles.org/en/stable/specification.html#et-al.
You can explicitly list et-al as a sub-element of names and then apply styling to it, such as
<names variable="author">
<name and="text"/>
<et-al font-style="italic"/>
</names>