Standard style when citing different authors from the same group I want to cite a series of three papers (condensed-matter physics, if it matters) where the first author is a different person in each case, say authors A, B and C, but all the papers come from the same group led by author D. That is, the list of authors in each paper is "A, ..., and D", "B, ..., and D", and "C, ..., and D".

Cited independently, I would refer to these papers as "A et al.", "B et al." and "C et al.". However, I want to cite them as the most correct variant of "a series of papers by D's group".

My question is whether this is acceptable as above or it would undermine the work done by A, B and C, considering boss D was paying them but probably was too busy to work out the details of the paper, and most of the work was presumably done by A, B and C.

Is there a standard styling for these cases I can rely on?

Edit:

I finally just opted by

... as pointed out by the same group of authors on a series of papers [1-3], ...


which I think strengthens the idea that A, B, and C did not reach their conclusions separately but as part of a wider collaboration.
This is most likely a field-culture thing, but I find it very odd that you would treat the three papers as anything but independent pieces of work. If you want to indicate that the three papers are part of a series, you could always say something like 


  a series of papers [1,2,3] presented blah blah


On the one hand, you want to give the "group leader" prominence, and on the other hand you clearly recognize the potential unfairness. I can imagine some of my students being rightly upset if their dissertation work was referred to as "work from the lab of Prof. Venkat". 

I realize that many lab-driven disciplines are top-down in this way, but since there's a perfectly reasonable way to cite the work, I'd avoid highlighting the "lab leader" any more than merely by their presence on the author list.