[Tex/LaTex] Can one “manually override” BibTeX’s choice of citation keys by adding a field to the entry

Question

Normally, I'm basically OK with BibTeX's choice of citation key (by which I mean, the short symbol it shows in the final document, like [2] or [Hil05], not the one one types in the tex file), but every once in a while there's a paper that cries out for a particular key (such as the paper of Freyd, Hoste, Lickorish, Millet, Ocneano and Yetter in which the HOMFLY polynomial is defined clearly should have the key [HOMFLY], not [FHL+95]), or BibTeX picks a particularly bad one.

In these cases, is there a field one can insert into the bibtex entry to override the key choice, or something one can do other than editing the .bbl file?

Answer 1

Using biblatex, you may add the shorthand field:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=alphabetic]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{A01,
  shorthand = {Author},
  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Alpha},
}
@misc{B02,
  author = {Buthor, B.},
  year = {2002},
  title = {Bravo},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\nocite{*}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}