Change definition of \sameauthors to turn off by same dash

Question

I am using the amsplain style for the bibliography, but I do not want the dash instead of the names of duplicated authors.

I found this post Is it normal for BibTeX to replace similar author names with "------"? for IEEEtran style.

The amsref documentation says

Change the definition of \sameauthors if you don’t want to get a bysame dash.

How can I change the definition of \sameauthors command or do something similar to the post for amsrefs?

Edit: I am not using the amsrefs package. I only have a bib database and the lines:

\bibliographystyle{amsplain}

\bibliography{mybibfile}

If I add \usepackage{amsrefs} (thinking about using the nobysame option), I get lots of errors and the bibliography is not generated.

Answer 1

If you are using the amsrefs package, then you can turn off the dash with a package option. From the documentation:

6.4 Miscellaneous Options

nobysame: If two or more consecutive bibliography items have the same authors, amsrefs will normally replace the author names in the second and succeeding entries by a horizontal rule (_ _ _ _ _). This option disables this feature, causing the full author names to always be printed.

If you are just using the amsplain.bst as a bibliography style, you will need to make a new version of the .bst file that doesn't print the dash. Here are instructions for editing the .bst file. (I'll assume a TeXLive installation).

Open /usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/bibtex/bst/amscls/amsplain.bst

Inside you will find the following function around line 367.

FUNCTION {format.authors}
{ author empty$
    { "" }
    { bysame "\bysame" =
         {"\bysame"}
         { author format.names }
     if$
    }
  if$
}

Change this to:

FUNCTION {format.authors}
    { author format.names }

Then save the file as amsplain-nodash.bst in a place where TeX can find it. If this is for a single document, you could save it in the same folder as the document. If you want to use this more generally, save it in <path-to-local-texmf>/texmf/bibtex/bst/ and then you can use it with any document.

Then in your document, use:

\bibliographystyle{amsplain-nodash}

Answer 2

If you use amsrefs, try to add this

\usepackage[nobysame]{amsrefs}

A short example

\documentclass[twoside]{amsart}
\usepackage[alphabetic]{amsrefs}
\begin{document}
\begin{bibdiv}
\begin{biblist}
\bib{Gan1}{article}
{author={Gan}}
\bib{Gan2}{article}
{author={Gan}}
\end{biblist}
\end{bibdiv}
\end{document}

If you compile the above code, you will get

While if you add nobysame and change the above code to

\documentclass[twoside]{amsart}
\usepackage[alphabetic,nobysame]{amsrefs}
\begin{document}
\begin{bibdiv}
\begin{biblist}
\bib{Gan1}{article}
{author={Gan}}
\bib{Gan2}{article}
{author={Gan}}
\end{biblist}
\end{bibdiv}
\end{document}

and recompile, you will get the following

Answer 3

Try changing the bibliography style. Changing the bibliography style from \bibliographystyle{amsplain} to \bibliographystyle{unsrt} worked for me.