What is the meaning of et. al?

jarui7

I have come across some books that showing \"such as Edum-Fotme, et al. (1996)\".
  \"et al.\" is Latin and short for \"et alii\" (or \"et aliae\" if it's only referring to women).
So, from the example you gave, we know that your article or paper
was written by someone with the surname \"Edum-Fotme\" and that there
were other authors credited to that reference, too. If you then looked
at the References/Bibliography section of where you found that, you
would see \"Edum-Fotme\" listed as well as all the other authors who were
given credit.
In other words, it's a short way of referring to a source (book, paper,
article) when the list of authors is too long to comfortably mention.