1

I am trying to use alpha bibliography style, but I have to customise it. what I have in my .bib file is : 

@book{laue,
    Author = {Kurt Laue and Helmut Stenger},
    Date-Added = {2014-05-06 20:55:13 +0000},
    Date-Modified = {2014-05-06 20:55:42 +0000},
    Title = {Strangpressen: Verfahren, Maschinen, Werkzeuge},
    Year = {1976}}

and naturally I get:

enter image description here

But instead of this I would like to have the bibliography and citations appear like [LAU76] instead of [LS76]. I mean, I would like to appear all of my citations first 3 letters(capital) of the first author and the year of the publication.

How do I do that? Thanks...

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2
  • So to be clear: You always want to have only the first three letters of the first author's last name regardless of the total number of authors?
    – moewe
    Commented May 8, 2014 at 17:42
  • Precisely, and the last 2 digits of the year. Sounds a bit weird I know..
    – alp
    Commented May 8, 2014 at 18:13

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4

You can redefine the the way the label is created by Biber with \DeclareLabelalphaTemplate.

\renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}

This is to get rid of the + if there are more authors than maxnames.

\DeclareLabelalphaTemplate{
  \labelelement{
    \field[final]{shorthand}
    \field{label}
    \field[strwidth=3,strside=left]{labelname}
  }
  \labelelement{
    \field[strwidth=2,strside=right]{year}    
  }
}

This always takes the first three names of the last name of the first author and adds the last two digits of the year.

We also set maxalphanames=1 and minalphanames=1

\usepackage[maxalphanames=1, minalphanames=1, style=alphabetic, backend=biber]{biblatex}

MWE

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{laue,
    Author = {Kurt Laue and Helmut Stenger},
    Date-Added = {2014-05-06 20:55:13 +0000},
    Date-Modified = {2014-05-06 20:55:42 +0000},
    Title = {Strangpressen: Verfahren, Maschinen, Werkzeuge},
    Year = {1976}}
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage[maxalphanames=1, minalphanames=1, style=alphabetic, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}

\DeclareLabelalphaTemplate{
  \labelelement{
    \field[final]{shorthand}
    \field{label}
    \field[strwidth=3,strside=left]{labelname}
  }
  \labelelement{
    \field[strwidth=2,strside=right]{year}    
  }
}

\begin{document}
  \cite{laue,wilde,baez/article,cicero}
  \printbibliography
\end{document}

enter image description here

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6
  • Hello again, this solution worked like magic, thank you very much. But I came across another problem: I will be using German references and I will be using references with names with "ü, ö, ä". For example: I have in references a book from "Klaus Müller" from 2004, with this code you helped me I will have [MUL04]. But what I need to get instead of this is [MUE04]. So instead of "ü" I need "ue". How should I have latex to do this? Thank you very much again.
    – alp
    Commented May 14, 2014 at 12:29
  • @alp If you use UTF8 (\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}, make sure to set the file encoding in your .tex and .bib file accordingly) and have Müller in your .bib file, you should get "[Mül04]", which I think is right. To get "[Mue04]" we would have to go to quite a lot of modifications.
    – moewe
    Commented May 14, 2014 at 18:02
  • how complex would be the modifications for [MUE04], would that be extreme complex ?
    – alp
    Commented May 14, 2014 at 20:19
  • I see two options: Let biblatex replace every "ü", "ä", "ö", "ß" by "oe", "ae", "oe", "ss" automatically via a mapping feature, but since you want the proper spelling in the bibliography we would need to define a new field for that (in fact some new fields: authornm, shortauthornm, editornm, shorteditornm, tranbslatornm) and those would be used for the label (maybe there is a way with the upcoming biblatex 3). This gets even harder if your .bib file contains LaTeX escape sequences and not proper UTF8 characters. Why do you want this anyway?
    – moewe
    Commented May 15, 2014 at 5:06
  • Well I don't, my institute wants it so, I will try to find another way, or ask them to use Ü, Ö, Ä etc. as it is in [MÜL04]. I am also not familiar with this kind of a bibliography style and I personally think this is just ridiculous. To be honest I am not an advanced latex user, and this seems a bit too dark. Thanks for helping anyway. I will post again if I can come any further.
    – alp
    Commented May 16, 2014 at 13:32
0

If you don't like the proper way, I propose a hack:

\newcommand{\Bibkeyhack}[3]{}

use it like

author = {This Is The Author\Bibkeyhack LAU}

Full answer here.

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