plk/biblatex-apa

Group author abbreviations

Closed this issue · 3 comments

pat-githubber commented

Hello,

I would like to group author abbreviation according to the The examples in the APA style guide:

image

I checked the Package documentation and the biblatex-apa-test.tex but I cannot identify, how the group author abbreviation is generated. According to the given example, I assume that The American Psychological Association and APA are defined in the bib file.

So, How do I achieve group author abbreviation in practice?
Where and how is the full author (e.g. The American Psychological Association) and its abbreviation (APA) defined?

Thank you for this regard package!!

moewew commented

The long author names goes into the author field, the abbreviated form into shortauthor.

\documentclass[american]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

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

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{8.21a,
  author      = {{The American Psychological Association}},
  shortauthor = {APA},
  title       = {Title1},
  date        = {2017},
}
@book{8.21b,
  author      = {{The American Psychological Association}},
  shortauthor = {APA},
  title       = {Title2},
  date        = {2006},
}

\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{8.21a}

ipsum \autocite{8.21b}

dolor \autocite{8.21a}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

You can find many examples from the APA manual in https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/blob/master/bibtex/bib/biblatex-apa-test-references.bib and the examples from the biblatex-apa docs in https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/blob/master/bibtex/bib/biblatex-apa-test-citations.bib (note that groupauthor is an obsolete field that has been superseded by author: #157).

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pat-githubber commented

I haven't checked the sub-directory master/bibtex/bib/ here at GitHub 🤦‍♂️ many thanks!!

After a quick research and try out, I discovered that neither Mendeley nor Zotero offers a shortauthor field.

  • Mendeley web research: no results
  • Mendeley on MacOS: Preferences -> Document Details -> Show fields: here, the field shortauthor is not listed
  • Zotero Forum: shortauthor not available, see Looking for short author field

How do you use/implement shortauthor in practice? I assume it is done manually?

I probably will use the available field shorttitle in Mendeley, and manually search&replace shorttitle with shortauthor in the final bib file after my paper is done. I know that this could be done automatically with a latex code, which runs every time I compile, but I am not that advanced to realize this, yet.

moewew commented

shortauthor is a field in the standard biblatex data model. So software claiming to support biblatex could be expected to support this field.

I curate my .bib files manually, so I don't know a lot about tools like Mendeley and Zotero. From what I have seen so far it can be a bit tricky to get Mendeley to produce high-quality .bib files. I'd expect that there is some way to get Zotero to support shortauthor, if push comes to shove via Zotero Better BibTeX (https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/).

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