[Tex/LaTex] Writing a command to denote the “corresponding author”

footnotesmacros

For those of you who read academic papers, you might have noticed that on some papers, there is a symbol next to an author's name that marks them as the "corresponding author". (Usually this is the person who handles the communication between the authors and the publisher.)

For example, you might have the following authors:
J. Doe, Q. Public, J. Schmo*
and at the bottom of the first page, there would be a footnote:
* Corresponding author.

I would like to create a command that automatically places a symbol next to an author's name and inserts the corresponding footnote at the bottom of the page. For example, I could write
author{J. Doe \and Q. Public \and J. Schmo\correspondingauthor}
and it would format the authors as above.

Is there any way of doing this? I was tinkering around with a few ideas earlier, but as far as I can tell, you can't insert footnotes into the author field of a document.

Best Answer

I see no problem with using the \thanks macro for this purpose.

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\author{J. Doe, Q. Public, J. Schmo\thanks{Corresponding author.}}
\title{A nice paper}
\maketitle
\end{document}

If you prefer to set up a dedicated macro named \correspondingauthor, you could proceed as follows:

\documentclass{article}
\newcommand\correspondingauthor{\thanks{Corresponding author.}}
\begin{document}
\author{J. Doe, Q. Public, J. Schmo\correspondingauthor}
\title{A nice paper}
\maketitle
\end{document}
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