[Tex/LaTex] Problem in BibTeX with composite names

bibtex

In my .bib file, I have this entry:

@conference{HCS96,
  title={The Virtual Cinematographer: A Paradigm for Automatic Real-time Camera Control and Directing},
  author={Li-wei He and Michael F. Cohen and Davih H. Salesin},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques},
  pages={217--224},
  isbn={0897917464},
  year={1996},
  organization={ACM}
}

When I compile my thesis, I get this entry in the bibliography:

[wei He et al., 1996] wei He, L., Cohen, M. F., and Salesin, D. H. (1996). The virtual cinematographer: A paradigm for automatic real-time camera control and directing. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pages 217–224. ACM.

Why is the name of the first author produced this way?! It should rather be "He et al., 1996". Does anybody know how to fix this problem?

Best Answer

Usually, issues with a name in BibTeX can be resolved by enclosing the mistreated part in {}, so if you write your author line like this:

  author={{Li-wei} He and Michael F. Cohen and Davih H. Salesin},

you will be fine. I just tested it on a dummy file with this one fix to your entry, and -- using apalike for my style -- I got this result:

References

[He et al., 1996] He, L., Cohen, M. F., and Salesin, D. H. (1996). The virtual cinematographer: A paradigm for automatic real-time camera control and directing. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pages 217–224. ACM.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] BibTex problem with multiple names in author field despite using “and”

You are specifying

\bibliographystyle{plain}

which in turn specifies that lists of names should be formatted by this readable bit of code:

FUNCTION {format.names}
{ 's :=
  #1 'nameptr :=
  s num.names$ 'numnames :=
  numnames 'namesleft :=
    { namesleft #0 > }
    { s nameptr "{ff~}{vv~}{ll}{, jj}" format.name$ 't :=
      nameptr #1 >
        { namesleft #1 >
            { ", " * t * }
            { numnames #2 >
                { "," * }
                'skip$
              if$
              t "others" =
                { " et~al." * }
                { " and " * t * }
              if$
            }
          if$
        }
        't
      if$
      nameptr #1 + 'nameptr :=
      namesleft #1 - 'namesleft :=
    }
  while$
}

somewhere in the middle of that you will see it adds , or and or et al depending on the number of names left in the list.

You could tinker with that, although you should not change the default file, or more easily find another bibtex style that does what you want. (perhaps use the makebst package to make one). You need to decide what you want to do for lists of length 0,1,2,3 and more than N for some N.

You want a, b not a and b but what do you want for a list of three, the normal choices are either a, b, and c or a, b and c but perhaps you want a, b, c (If you do want that you can just change and in a copy of the above to , I think.

[Tex/LaTex] Cyrillic first names problem with natbib and bibtex

BibTeX is not really suited for UTF-8 encoding. In many cases it works, but it will definitely have problems with extraction of initials, because, for example, a Cyrillic ‘А’ is two bytes (0xD090) and only the first byte is selected.

You can work around this by using the internal representation of the Cyrillic letter:

@book{belyj1913,
  Address = {Москва},
  Author = {{\CYRA}ндрей Белый},
  Publisher = {Наука},
  Title = {Петербург},
  Year = {1981},
}

which will work independently whether only initials or full names are used.

However, sorting by author names is not really guaranteed to be correct. You should try biblatex and biber, which are UTF-8 compliant.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] BibTex problem with multiple names in author field despite using “and”

[Tex/LaTex] Cyrillic first names problem with natbib and bibtex

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