Should I write "Jones and Smith's" or "Jones and Smiths'" ?

[MamaChris]

I want to refer to work by joint authors. Should I write "In Jones and Smith's paper..." or, because there are two authors, "In Jones and Smiths' paper"? The first looks right to me, but I've got up too early and can't see why it's right. Can anyone explain?

first one, cos author's name is smith, not smiths

lol, like anyone would take punctuation advice from me actually i (usually) punctuate fine, just don't capitalise.

Hog is right.

I still don't understand why - I'd write "the biologists' theory" (more than one biologist) - but at least I know I'm right

Shouldn't it be "In Jones' [or Jones's, though I dislike this] and Smith's paper"? "Jones and Smith" is not one name, so surely demands two apostrophes?

Agree with portillista

Whenever I was writing about a paper with 2 authors I never thought the apostrophes looked right no matter what, so I said "in the paper by Smith and Jones..."! Cop-out but it saved me from tearing my hair out

'In the paper by Smith and Jones...' reads better imo too nelly.

that's an easy way out nelly! but, in fact, it's not a paper, but a statistical score function, which I'm comparing to an alternative. So the full sentence is more like "Brown et al propose a score, S, which may be used in place of Smith and Jones' T in equation X."

Or should that be "... Smith's and Jones' T*"? The second form sounds wrong to me, but I still don't understand why the first would be right. Does anyone have a "rules of grammar" book which covers this?

Could you put a 'the' in before Smith and Jones

i.e. ''..which may be used in place of the Smith and Jones T* equation.''

Not really DHT. "... in place of the T in ..." sounds wrong, so I think "... in place of Smith and Jones' T in..." would also be wrong.

Oops. That should have read:

Not really DHT. "... in place of the T in ..." sounds wrong, so I think "... in place of the Smith and Jones' T in..." would also be wrong.

It should be "... Smith's and Jones' T"? "T" belongs to both Smith and Jones, therefore they both need apostrophes! "Smith and Jones' T" is common, but wrong.

Sorry - I copied and pasted your post Mamachris, so I left in the "?"!

"Jones and Smith's paper" is right, I believe. It's a compound possessive where Jones and Smith are treated as a single entity.

The only time you would do the double possessive thing is where one of the subjects is a pronoun: "Smith's and my paper".

I think