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In one certain entry of my bibliography the author is not printed, but just a '--'. In other entries there is no problem. What could be the reason.

This is the entry that causes trouble:

@article{josephson_discovery_1974,
    title = {The discovery of tunnelling supercurrents},
    volume = {46},
    doi = {10.1103/RevModPhys.46.251},
    abstract = {DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.46.251},
    journal = {Reviews of Modern Physics},
    author = {Josephson, B. D.},
    month = apr,
    year = {1974},
    note = {Publisher: American Physical Society},
    pages = {251--254},
}

For this entry the citation works as expected:

@article{josephson_possible_1962,
    title = {Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling},
    volume = {1},
    issn = {0031-9163},
    doi = {10.1016/0031-9163(62)91369-0},
    journal = {Physics Letters},
    author = {Josephson, B. D.},
    month = jul,
    year = {1962},
    pages = {251--253},
}

For the citations in my file I use \usepackage[backend=biber, style=ieee]{biblatex}. In the text I cite them by \cite{josephson_possible_1962,josephson_discovery_1974}.

qcabepsilon
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  • Welcome to TeX.SE. – Mico May 01 '23 at 16:25
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    The iees style is designed to replace the author field with ------ for entries with repeated author fields. It's not an error, it's a purposeful feature. If you can't stand this feature, though, just don't use the ieee style. – Mico May 01 '23 at 16:26
  • Ok, so that is the standard way. Why is that considered useful? – qcabepsilon May 01 '23 at 16:29
  • Do the two entries with the same author then always appear next to each other in the bibliography? – qcabepsilon May 01 '23 at 16:30
  • Sorry, but as I'm not the designer of the ieee style, I simply have no information as to why the actual designers chose this particular. Your second question, in contrast, is very easy to answer: It must be the case that the entire bibliography contains only one pair of entries with the same author -- here: Josephson, B. D.. Incidentally, since the ieee style sorts its entries first by surnames and then by year of publication, it's the josephson_discovery_1974 entry and not the josephson_possible_1962 entry that gets its author string replaced with ------. – Mico May 01 '23 at 16:32
  • You ask, "Do the two entries with the same author then always appear next to each other in the bibliography?" [emphasis added] The answer is yes for any bibliography style that sorts the entries first by authors' surnames and then, if available, by a second criterion. This second criterion is often the entries' publication dates. – Mico May 01 '23 at 16:35
  • You also asked, "Why is that considered useful?" Unfortunately, why-type questions can only be answered truthfully by the person(s) who actually made the stylistic choices in question. (To repeat: I'm not that person.) By the way, what good might it do you to receive factual anwers to such why-type questions? If you've been told that you must use the ieee style, does it really matter to know why certain stylistic choices were made? Unless the answers help resolve some moral or ethical conflict (which I doubt is the case here!), answers to why-type questions simply don't matter either way. – Mico May 01 '23 at 16:43
  • @mico Thank you for your answers. The motivation for that why-type question is that one can indeed sometimes learn something from them for other scenarios. Maybe a certain style makes a certain type of task easier that I did not immediately think of, but someone with a lot of experience came up with this solution. – qcabepsilon May 01 '23 at 16:51
  • I didn't claim that why-type questions are entirely pointless. I was pointing out that why-type questions regarding stylistic choices can only be answered meaningfully by the person(s) who actually made these choices -- and that I'm not that person, when it comes to the stylistic choices embedded in the ieee style. – Mico May 01 '23 at 17:03
  • Duplicate of https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/70411/35864. See also https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/29381/35864. The answer to the why is most likely that it saves space (at least in non-numeric styles it may also help visually group entries, but in numeric styles this effect is not as pronounced). – moewe May 01 '23 at 19:31

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