[Tex/LaTex] Is it normal for BibTeX to replace similar author names with “——“

bibtexieee-stylerules

In my .bib file, I have two entries with exactly the same author names:

@article{Seshadrinathan2010A-Subjective-St,
    Author = {K. Seshadrinathan and R. Soundararajan and A. C. Bovik and L. K. Cormack},
....

@article{Seshadrinathan2009Study-of-Subjec,
    Author = {K. Seshadrinathan and R. Soundararajan and A. C. Bovik and L. K. Cormack},
....

When cited after each other, and typeset with the IEEEtran bibliography style, the .bbl file reads:

\bibitem{Seshadrinathan2010A-Subjective-St}
K.~Seshadrinathan, R.~Soundararajan, A.~C. Bovik, and L.~K. Cormack, ``A
  subjective study to evaluate video quality assessment algorithms,''
  \emph{SPIE Proceedings Human Vision and Electronic Imaging}, 2010.

\bibitem{Seshadrinathan2009Study-of-Subjec}
------, ``Study of subjective and objective quality assessment of video,''
  \emph{IEEE Transactions on Image Processing}, 2009.

As you can see, the author names have been replaced with ------. It looks like this in the final PDF:

enter image description here

Is this normal behavior?

Best Answer

The behavior mentioned is the default using IEEEtran.bst style. To change it, you can define a IEEEtranBSTCTL entry in your bib database and change the default value for CTLdash_repeated_names. So, in this case, your entry should look like this:

@IEEEtranBSTCTL{IEEEexample:BSTcontrol,
  CTLdash_repeated_names = "no"
}

Then in the body of your .tex file you have to activate the change by using

\bstctlcite{IEEEexample:BSTcontrol}

Example (thanks to Marco):

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@IEEEtranBSTCTL{IEEEexample:BSTcontrol,
CTLdash_repeated_names= "no",
}

@article{Seshadrinathan2010A-Subjective-St,
    Author = {K. Seshadrinathan and R. Soundararajan and A. C. Bovik and L. K. Cormack},
    title={foo},
    year={2011},
    journal={bla}
}

@article{Seshadrinathan2009Study-of-Subjec,
    Author = {K. Seshadrinathan and R. Soundararajan and A. C. Bovik and L. K. Cormack},
    title={bar},
    year={2010},
    journal={bla}
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{IEEEtran}
%\usepackage{IEEEtrantools}% only needed if a class different from IEEEtran is used.


\begin{document}
\bstctlcite{IEEEexample:BSTcontrol}
\cite{Seshadrinathan2010A-Subjective-St}

\cite{Seshadrinathan2009Study-of-Subjec}


\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}

Result