In BibTeX and biblatex, it is well known that an author's name can have up to four components — the firstname, von, surname, and Jr components. (The von component will turn out to be irrelevant for my purposes.)
If a certain author's name has FirstName, SurName, and Jr components, one can enter it easily as
author = "SurName, Jr, FirstName",
However, some names — e.g., "Pliny the Younger", "Cato the Elder" — have a surname and a Jr component but but no FirstName component. Question: How does one enter such a name in a BibTeX database?
The natural attempt,
author = "SurName, Jr.Component",
is not correct because BibTeX interprets Jr.component as FirstName. This matters because some bibliography styles abbreviate first names, whereas the Jr component is — to the best of my knowledge — never abbreviated. Moreover, some bibliography styles place the firstname component ahead of the surname component; that's never done — again, to the best of my knowledge — to the Jr. component. I've also found that
author = "SurName, Jr.Component, ",
i.e., attempting to provide an "empty" FirstName Component, doesn't work either as it throws a BibTeX error.
I should add that it's important that the surname and Jr.Component parts be recognized separately by BibTeX. Thus, author = "{Pliny the Younger}", which treats the name as a single entity (a surname, actually), won't work for me.
Addendum: The use case that gave rise to this query is fairly unusual. I posted the query while trying to help the editor of an anthology of oral stories told by Amazon rainforest dwellers. Specifically, the task was to help organize and format the references and citation call-outs.
The story contributors all have only a single name each (no first names); some of the contributors are narrators, others are translators, etc. The book editor was looking to list the authors in the form
"XYZ, narrator and ABC, translator [remainder of formatted reference]"
in the references, and have citation call-outs of the form "XYZ and ABC". Note that the "narrator" and "translator" particles should show up only in the references (and should be separated from the names with a comma), but not in the citation call-outs.
My initial idea was to use the Jr component of a four-part bibtex-formated name to hold the authors' functional information (narrator, translator, etc): The Jr component is always typeset after the name, it is never abbreviated (the editor was using a bibliography style that abbreviates first names while listing them ahead of the surnames), and it is is separated from the (sur)name with a comma. Unfortunately, this idea didn't work, because the story tellers have single names, i.e., no separate first-name and last-name components…
In the end, I came up with a different solution: The natbib package allows setting up citation aliases. Thus, the author field could be defined as
author = "{XYZ, narrator} and {ABC, translator}",
and the citation call-out could be set to come out as "XYZ and ABC". Whew!
Best Answer
This is my solution: