[Tex/LaTex] Bold (or smallcaps) typesetting in bibliography

bibtextypography

I'd like to generate a bibliography where authors (or maybe the title of the cited document) are printed in bold/small caps. However, I've just been able to find the following entry related with this topic

Making bibtex reference entry bold?

where each entry in the bibliography needs to be tuned by hand. Unfortunately, I have such a long bibliography that I'd like to consider a cleaner/more automatic approach to do that. Is this possible? If so, how should I tune the small code below using pdflatex+bibtex?

\documentclass{article}
\title{This is my first document}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
Hello~\cite{AmSLaTeX},~\cite{nothing}.
\bibliography{biblio}
\bibliographystyle{is-plain}
\end{document}

with this bibliography

@ARTICLE{nothing,
         author    = "{noone et al.}",
         title     = "nothing",
         journal   = "nowhere",
         year      = 1986, }
@MANUAL{AmSLaTeX,
         author    = "{American Mathematical Society}",
         title     = "amslatex Version 1.2 User's Guide",
         month     = jan,
         year      = 1995, }

Edit

PS: This entry may be also useful to any forthcoming readers:
Biblatex bibliography title fields for different entries

Best Answer

You can have such a functionality easilly with the biblatex package, by redefining the mkbibnamefamilly command. See also the p.95 of the biblatex (Version 2.8a 25/11/2013) documentation.

\begin{filecontents*}{biblio.bib}
@ARTICLE{nothing,
         author    = {Noone and others},
         title     = "nothing",
         journal   = "nowhere",
         year      = 1986, }
@MANUAL{AmSLaTeX,
         author    = {{American Mathematical Society}},
         title     = "amslatex Version 1.2 User's Guide",
         month     = jan,
         year      = 1995, }
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex8]{biblatex}
\bibliography{biblio}
% Chose one of the following.
\renewcommand\mkbibnamefamily[1]{\textbf{#1}}
%\renewcommand\mkbibnamefamily[1]{\textsc{#1}}
\begin{document}
Hello~\cite{AmSLaTeX},~\cite{nothing}.
\printbibliography[title={My Custom Title}]
\end{document}

(Versions prior to biblatex 3.3 should use \mkbibnamelast instead of \mkbibnamefamily.)

If you uncomment the "small caps" version and comment the bold version, you get :

Sample output

The general way to adopt biblatex is explained in the answer's to What to do to switch to biblatex?.

Edit You can finely tune what will be displayed in bold / small caps with the following options:

\mkbibnamefamily{text} This command, which takes one argument, is used to format the last name of all authors, editors, translators, etc.
\mkbibnamefirst{text} Similar to \mkbibnamefamily, but intended for the first name.
\mkbibnameprefix{text} Similar to \mkbibnamefamily, but intended for the name prefix.
\mkbibnameaffix{text} Similar to \mkbibnamefamily, but intended for the name affix.

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