[Tex/LaTex] biblatex: Setting maxnames on individual entries

author-numberbiberbiblatex

I'm using biblatex (with biber as backend). I use the global maxnames option to shorten author lists (with "et al."). However, I would like to create some exceptions to this rule for some specific entries.

I was hoping I could use the options entry field (for per-entry options).

For example, I would use the following global setting:

\usepackage[bibstyle=numeric-comp,citestyle=numeric-comp,backend=biber,maxnames=3]{biblatex}

I would then override the maxnames setting for some individual items, for example to allow a longer authors list, like so:

@INPROCEEDINGS{Vallejos2009b,
  author = {John Doe and Pete Peters and Jane Jones and John Johnson and Alison Anderson},
  title = {Some Title},
  booktitle = {...},
  year = {2009},
  options = {maxnames=5}
}

Unfortunately this does not work because maxnames is not supported as an entry-level option. At least in the current biblatex version.

Does anyone have an idea how I could do something like that?

PS: I use numeric citation style so my question only concerns the abbreviation of author lists in the bibliography itself.

Best Answer

You can't reliably do this yourself by either bib file keywords or style edits because maxnames (and maxbibnames, maxalphanames) is used internally by biber to do all sorts of things when generating the .bbl. So if it's not supported in biber as a per-entry option, entry information will potentially be wrong/inconsistent like labels, hashes and uniquename/uniquelist settings.

We have had a look at this and the functionality will be implemented in the next biber and biblatex versions, probably 0.9.6/1.7. You will be able to set:

maxnames/minnames maxcitenames/mincitenames maxbibnames/minbibnames maxalphanames/minalphanames maxitems/minitems

on a per-type and per-entry basis.

Just to confirm that this is now implemented in biber 0.9.6/biblatex 1.7 which were released a couple of days ago.

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