Dear, Mike Simmons

in this case it is clear that the sentence or the idea is belonging to the author not 13 references.

another form of right citation for above sentence "the convergence along the Zagros suture has been variably dated as Late Cretaceous to Pliocene by many authors [for example, see Stöcklin, 1968; Falcon, 1969; Haynes and McQuillan, 1974; Stoneley,1981; Berberian and King, 1981; Koop and Stoneley,1982; Alavi, 1994, 2004, 2007; Hamzepour et al.,1999; McQuarrie et al., 2003; Homke et al., 2004; Allen et al., 2004; Mouthereau et al., 2012)

Dear Dr. Karim,

You have not written the page in the issue of the paper mentioned, so that I cannot identify the article you mentioned. However, I suppose as follows: the authors of the paper intended to mean that the dating of the convergence along the Zagros suture had differently been made from Late Cretaceous to Pliocene in the references cited. Thus, the citing of plural papers are necessary here.

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

Dear, Tatsuo Tabata , your are right, but according rule of "in text citation" any sentence (idea) comes before an author name (in the same sentence)must be the """ original source for the idea) not the idea of the author of the paper. Therefore, i think the authors , must pay attention to their idea (or concluded information) by paraphrasing the their idea in clear and understandable form to be differentiated easily from the the original (literature) sources

Dear Dr. Karim,

Thanks for your reply. Now I understand what you mean as follows: The authors of the paper from which you quoted the part of plural citations in the same parentheses had better rewritten in this way by writing the concluded information for each cited paper:

"The convergence along the Zagros suture has been variably dated; namely, as Late Cretaceous (Stöcklin, 1968), as ... (Falcon, 1969), as ... (...), ..., as Pliocene (Mouthereau et al., 2012)."

(Although the correspondence between the dates assigned and authors might be wrong, this is an example of the style only of better citation.)

Some authors might have concluded the same dating with different methods. Then, the following plural citations might be allowed here with the preferable inclusion of the methods used: "as Late Cretaceous (author A, year A, with method A; author B, year B, with method B)". This is because the differences in the concluded information seems more important here than differences in the method.

Best regards,

Tatsuo Tabata

Dear Dr Kamal H Karim, it is simply honor of researcher. It is up to you how would like to make this citations. Different researcher work on the similar or little bit different types of research and they get the similar findings.

Dear, Tatsuo Tabata , thank you too much for your detail reply , God save for us