[Tex/LaTex] Citation style with first letters of author’s lastname

biblatex

I'm searching for a citation style. I'm using biblatex and I want the following citation using the first letters of the last name and the year of publishing:

  • For only one author the reference should consider the first three letters and the year like: [Lot08] for the name Loth and the year 2008.

  • For more than one author the reference should look like this [BMCW12] which contains the first letters of the lastname of the authors (Becker, Meier, Conrady, Wolf) and the year.

I know this is very similar to the alphabetic style but I don't want to get the plus inside the cite like [BMC+12]. In addition I want to fix the number of letters to 4 even if there are more authors.

Is there such a citation style available or do I have to adjust the alphabetic style?

Best Answer

You can customise the alphabetic label style quite heavily with \DeclareLabelalphaTemplate (see ยง4.5.4 Labels, pp. 163-169 of the biblatex manual). In your case that is not necessary, however.

You only need the add the two options

maxalphanames=4, minalphanames=4

to your biblatex call to get the number of names as desired.

And then 

\renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}

gets rid of the "+" that shows that authors have been omitted.

MWE

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[style=alphabetic,maxalphanames=4,minalphanames=4]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,worman,geer,aksin,companion}
\printbibliography
\end{document}
Related Question