[Tex/LaTex] Indicating joint first authorship through special markup in biblatex/biber

bibentrybiberbiblatexbibliographiesciting

I am using biblatex/biber to typeset the bibliography for my thesis. For one particular reference where I am the joint first author, my PhD examiners have requested that I should expressly indicate this using appropriate markup that makes this fact unambiguous to readers.

Let's say. we have a thesis.bib file with the relevant entry.

@article{Doe2018,
author = {Doe, John and Bloggs, Joe and Supervisor, Nice},
journal = {Journal of Pure Awesomeness},
month = {jun},
pages = {507--514},
publisher = {DodgyPublisher},
title = {{The next big breakthrough in science}},
volume = {17},
year = {2018}
}

In this case, both John Doe and Joe Bloggs have been designated as the joint first authors. The PDF of the published article and the publisher's HTML landing page for the article identifies this clearly. The internal examiner and additionally the supervisor (also a co-author/last author on the aforementioned article) are aware that the contribution from both authors is split equally and therefore, neither one can claim full credit in the thesis.

So the question is, in the bibliography, how can this entry be specially marked e.g. with underlines for the two first author names? Following the bibliography entry formatted according to whichever style being used (barring the newly introduced underlines), the following sentence should be appended – "The underlined authors are joint first authors and contributed equally to this work".

Can we make up a custom bibliography command for this, given that we are using the highly flexible biber/biblatex combo?

Here is a minimal non-working example. The \customcite command does not yet exist, but indicated what is required.

\documentclass[a4paper]{book}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=numeric-comp, sorting=none, citestyle=numeric-comp, maxbibnames=50, url=true, doi=true, eprint=false, backref=true, backrefstyle=three]{biblatex}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\addbibresource{thesis.bib}

\begin{document}

Blah blah \dots as seen in the research article published~\customcite{Doe2018}.

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Best Answer

You can use data annotations for that. Have a look at §3.6 Data Annotations of the biblatex documentation.

The annotation jointfirst can be attached to each name in a name list. If a name has this annotation it will be printed in bold (in this example).

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[backend=biber, style=numeric-comp, sorting=none,
  maxbibnames=50, eprint=false,
  backref=true, backrefstyle=three]{biblatex}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamefamily}[1]{%
  \ifitemannotation{jointfirst}
    {\textbf{#1}}
    {#1}}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Doe2018,
  author    = {Doe, John and Bloggs, Joe and Supervisor, Nice},
  author+an = {1=jointfirst;2=jointfirst},
  title     = {The next big breakthrough in science},
  journal   = {Journal of Pure Awesomeness},
  volume    = {17},
  date      = {2018-06},
  pages     = {507--514},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
Blah blah \dots as seen in the research article published~\cite{Doe2018}.

Blah blah \dots as seen in the research article published~\cite{sigfridsson}.

\printbibliography
\end{document}

If you want to have the full name in bold you can redefine \mkbibnamecomplete (new in biblatex 3.13, https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/853, see the edit history of this question if you need an implementation or a cheap workaround)

\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamecomplete}[1]{%
  \ifitemannotation{jointfirst}
    {\textbf{#1}}
    {#1}}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Bibliography with BibLaTeX: Do not abbreviate first given (first) name and abbreviate all further given names

As biblatex does not distinguish multiple first names, we need to split this list ourselves:

\makeatletter
\def\@empty{}
\def\first#1{\expandafter\@first#1 \@nil}
\def\@first#1 #2\@nil{#1\addspace%
  \if\relax\detokenize{#2}\relax\else\@initials#2\@nil\fi}
\def\initials#1{\expandafter\@initials#1 \@nil}
\def\@initials#1 #2\@nil{%
  \initial{#1}%
  \def\NextName{#2}%
  \ifx\@empty\NextName\relax%
  \else\@initials#2\@nil\fi}
\def\initial#1{\expandafter\@initial#1\@nil}
\def\@initial#1#2\@nil{#1.\addspace}
\makeatother

Now calling \first{John Arthur Kyle} yields "John A. K.".

The trick used is that the macro \first passes its argument to \@first which in turn delimits its arguments by spaces, i.e. #1 is "John" and #2 is "Arthur Kyle". This gets sent to \@initials which goes through the list of names (in case there are more or less than two) and calls \initial with each name. \initial in turn calls \@initial which throws away all but the first letter and adds a dot and a space.

Now we can use this in \DeclareNameFormat:

\def\bibnamedelima{ }%
\def\bibnamedelimb{ }%
\DeclareNameFormat{author}{%
  \ifblank{#5}{}{#5\addspace}% prefix if applicable
  #1% last name
  \edef\firstname{#3}%
  \ifblank{#3}{}{\addcomma\addspace\expandafter\first{\firstname}}%
  \ifthenelse{\value{listcount}<\value{liststop}}%
   {\addslash}{}%
}

Note that for author = {Doe, John Arthur Kyle} in the bib file, #3 actually consists of John\bibnamedelimb Arthur\bibnamedelima Kyle, so we need to eliminate these for the \first macro to work.

EDIT: a "proper" NameFormat should include deliminators for multiple names, thus we check if we are in the middle of a list of names and if so print a slash.

Additionally, the authoryear style uses labelname to display the author name in citations, so that format should be changed to keep the formatting of the citation in line with that of the bibliography entry:

\DeclareNameFormat{labelname}{%
  \ifblank{#5}{}{#5\addspace}% prefix if applicable
  #1% last name
  \edef\firstname{#3}%
  \ifblank{#3}{}{\addcomma\addspace\expandafter\first{\firstname}}%
  \ifthenelse{\value{listcount}<\value{liststop}}%
   {\addslash}{}%
}

To summarize: This code

\documentclass{scrartcl}

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\bibliography{bibliography}

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\def\bibnamedelima{ }%
\def\bibnamedelimb{ }%
\DeclareNameFormat{author}{%
  \ifblank{#5}{}{#5\addspace}% prefix if applicable
  #1% last name
  \edef\firstname{#3}%
  \ifblank{#3}{}{\addcomma\addspace\expandafter\first{\firstname}}%
  \ifthenelse{\value{listcount}<\value{liststop}}%
   {\addslash}{}%
}

\DeclareNameFormat{labelname}{%
  \ifblank{#5}{}{#5\addspace}% prefix if applicable
  #1% last name
  \edef\firstname{#3}%
  \ifblank{#3}{}{\addcomma\addspace\expandafter\first{\firstname}}%
  \ifthenelse{\value{listcount}<\value{liststop}}%
   {\addslash}{}%
}

\makeatletter
\def\@empty{}
\def\first#1{\expandafter\@first#1 \@nil}
\def\@first#1 #2\@nil{#1\addspace%
  \if\relax\detokenize{#2}\relax\else\@initials#2\@nil\fi}
\def\initials#1{\expandafter\@initials#1 \@nil}
\def\@initials#1 #2\@nil{%
  \initial{#1}%
  \def\NextName{#2}%
  \ifx\@empty\NextName\relax%
  \else\@initials#2\@nil\fi}
\def\initial#1{\expandafter\@initial#1\@nil}
\def\@initial#1#2\@nil{#1.\addspace}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\cite[123]{Doe}\par
\cite[124]{Doe2}\par
\cite[125]{vD}
\printbibliography

\end{document}

together with this bib file:

@book{Doe,
    title = {The secret life of John Doe},
    author = {Doe, John Arthur Kyle and Jane Emma Dane and Someone Else},
    year = {2013}
}

@book{Doe2,
    title = {The secret life of John Doe 2},
    author = {Doe, John},
    year = {2013}
}

@book{vD,
    title = {The secret life of John von Doe},
    author = {John Arthur Kyle von Doe},
    year = {2013}
}

produces this output:

cropped pdf output

EDIT: For more details on splitting strings, see e.g. the answers to this question; for information on macros using "strange" argument delimiters, see e.g. this thread.

[Tex/LaTex] Citing (author, journalabbr., year) needed

First thing to do is to add a field for the journal abbreviation to the article entrytype, journalabbr in the MWE. Therefore you need to declare a datamodel (an extra file; in the MWE I've used filecontents to simulate that) and you have to tell biblatex/biber to use it in the package options.

Then you have to modify the cite command, so it fits your needs. \citep from the authoryear-style (your citestyle) uses the \cite command. There you just have to add a switch, which checks if the field journalabbr is empty or not, and prints it out or not.

Last but not least you have to add the abbreviation fields to the entries.

MWE:

\begin{filecontents}{min.bib}
@article{boisson2003unexpected,
  title={Unexpected protein families including cell defense components feature in the N-myristoylome of a higher eukaryote},
  author={Boisson, B. and Giglione, Carmela and Meinnel, Thierry},
  journal={Journal of Biological Chemistry},
  journalabbr={JBC},
  year={2003},
  publisher={ASBMB}
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{authorjabbryear.dbx}
\ProvidesFile{authorjabbryear.dbx}
\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field,datatype=literal]{journalabbr}
\DeclareDatamodelEntryfields[article]{journalabbr}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass[fontsize=11pt, paper=a4, ngerman, DIV=calc]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[scaled]{helvet}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}
\usepackage{fixltx2e}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[german=quotes]{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-comp,sortcites=true,sorting=nyt,isbn=false,natbib=true, citestyle=authoryear,bibstyle=authoryear,backend=biber,maxnames=1,maxcitenames=1,
,datamodel=authorjabbryear%added!
] {biblatex}

\DefineBibliographyStrings{ngerman}{ andothers = {{et\,al\adddot}} }

\renewbibmacro*{cite}{%from authoryear.cbx
  \iffieldundef{shorthand}
    {\ifthenelse{\ifnameundef{labelname}\OR\iffieldundef{labelyear}}
       {\usebibmacro{cite:label}%
        \setunit{\addspace}}
       {\printnames{labelname}%
        \setunit{\nameyeardelim}}%
     \iffieldundef{journalabbr}{}{%
        \printfield{journalabbr}%
        \setunit{\nameyeardelim}%
        }%
     \usebibmacro{cite:labelyear+extrayear}}
    {\usebibmacro{cite:shorthand}}}

\addbibresource{min.bib}

\begin{document}

\citep{boisson2003unexpected} 

How it should look like: 

(Boisson et al., JBC, 2003)

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Bibliography with BibLaTeX: Do not abbreviate first given (first) name and abbreviate all further given names

[Tex/LaTex] Citing (author, journalabbr., year) needed

Related Question