With regards to Robert W. Smith et al. please list the "et al." as:
sorted alphabetically by last name
S. Cole
Laurent Desnogues
Robert Gerbicz
Dana Jacobsen
Antonio P Key
Luigi Morelli
Anand Nair
C.E.L. Pinho
Martin Raab
Thomas Ritschel
David Stevens
At some point it might be useful to de-ambiguate names (e.g.
BibTeX names -- names are complicated), and fortunately no need for collation locality yet.