I'm using mla-paper package. the name Ferdinand de Saussure in bibliography gets shown as De Saussure, Ferdinand. But I want de in lowercase like so: de Saussure, Ferdinand. In citations it gets shown as (de Saussure), which is fine, but in bibliography it gets capitalised. And is there is a way to get the bibtex display the name as: Saussure, Ferdinand de? The mla bib format doesn't accept comma in between while specifying the author name.
[Tex/LaTex] Preserve lowercase in bibtex
bibtexcapitalizationmla-style
Related Solutions
Now the correct one ;-)
The option sortcites should work:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=authoryear,backend=biber,useprefix=false,sortcites=true]{biblatex}
\usepackage{ifpdf}
\makeatletter
\AtBeginDocument{\toggletrue{blx@useprefix}}
\AtBeginBibliography{\togglefalse{blx@useprefix}}
\makeatother
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{Saussure1995,
Author = {Ferdinand de Saussure},
Origyear = {1916},
Publisher = {Payot},
Title = {Cours de Linguistique G{\'e}n{\'e}rale},
Year = {1995}}
@book{Labov1972,
Address = {Philadelphia},
Author = {William Labov},
Publisher = {University of Pennsylvania Press},
Title = {Sociolinguistic Patterns},
Year = {1972}}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname}
\begin{document}
The relation between the the sign and the signified is arbitrary \autocite{Saussure1995,Labov1972}.
Language change is driven by language variation. \autocite{Labov1972}.
\printbibliography
\end{document}
A working scheme seems to be
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[authoryear]{natbib}
\usepackage{hyperref}
% #1: sorting key, #2: prefix for citation, #3: prefix for bibliography
\DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#2} % set up for citation
\begin{document}
\citet{vannoort}
\citet{other}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
% here we change the meaning of \VAN to use the prefix for the bibliography
\DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#3}
\bibliography{vannoort}
\end{document}
where the entry in the .bib file is
@article{vannoort,
author={{\VAN{Noort}{Van}{van}} Noort, Thomas},
title={An important paper},
year=2010,
}
In the first argument to \VAN you can put anything you need to ensure correct sorting.
A couple of words, as asked by Florian Rubach.
To BibTeX, something like {\command{something}} is like an "accent"; usually one does {\"{u}} to get sorting of ü like "u" (which may not be correct in German, but it is for English). However, this feature can be used to force the sorting we want.
With \DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#2} in the preamble, we are saying that when LaTeX finds \VAN{Noort}{Van}{van} in the document, it should ignore the first and third argument, so printing "Van". This will come from what has been stored reading the aux file. However, before the bibliography we change the command so that it ignores the first and second argument, so printing "van", which is what's desired in the bibliography.
The first argument is never used by LaTeX, but it is by BibTeX; the string in the first argument can be anything that ensures correct sorting: It comes before the rest of the surname, so it will the most important information for sorting.
I should mention that I wouldn't change how a name appears in the two places.
Best Answer
Rather than modify your
bibfile, which will override formatting that may be required by other bibliography styles you should probably do this with your bibliography style. For the MLA style, the thebiblatex-mlapackage is the best. See Biblatex and mla-paper making weird headings for how to use this with themla-paperpackage.The standard MLA format for non-capitalized name prefixes is that the appear after the first name in the bibliography; furthermore the name is alphabetized without the prefix (so de Saussure is alphabetized with S not with D.)
The
biblatex-mlapackage (somewhat oddly, IMO) takes the opposite route, and puts the prefix first, and alphabetizes with it with the prefix (D in this case.)To change this behaviour, you can add the
useprefix=falseoption to thebiblatexpackage options. However, this will produce an in-text citation without the prefix (i.e., Saussure instead of de Saussure). The waybiblatexis set up, there is no direct way to use the prefix in citations without it also affecting the sorting and bibliography formatting. But leaving the prefix out in citations is acceptable, and in many cases the proper way to refer to a name in a citation.Update However, based on the answers to this question: how to modify the biblatex 'useprefix' option it's easy to get exactly what you want. Here's a complete solution: