Equal contribution (co-first authors) in BibTeX

Question

Is there a standard way of indicating co-first authorships in a BibTeX entry?

Equal-contribution is usually indicated by * (or some other symbol) next to the author names in the paper, but it is a rather recent phenomenon as I understand it.

I never actually saw it indicated in the reference sections when cited, but it is a valuable meta-data that might be useful for the future. Hence, I want to put it in the BibTeX meta data. I can imagine a new bibliography format showing co-first authors in the reference (but this is not likely to happen though).

I'd be a bit wary about 'usually' here. In my area (chemistry) a star (or several stars) indicates the 'author to whom correspondence should be addressed', i.e. the lead author(s). — Joseph Wright, Sep 16 '13 at 05:53
@JosephWright the symbol is of course flexible. footnote or side note is there for the interpretation of symbols. — Memming, Sep 16 '13 at 05:59
biblatex offers the field authortype, one might be able to expand this to the host of possibilities one has with editor[a|b|c] and editor[a|b|c]type. — moewe, Sep 16 '13 at 17:37
related question: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/126864/annotating-co-first-author-in-bibliography — Memming, Sep 17 '13 at 04:13
More importantly (in my field), shared first author papers are referred to differently: Instead of referencing a paper as “Foo et al.”, it should be referenced as “Foo, Bar et al.”. — Konrad Rudolph, Sep 22 '14 at 14:05
I believe the bibliography formatting here answers the poster's question: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/468623/indicating-joint-first-authorship-through-special-markup-in-biblatex-biber — helmingstay, Dec 18 '22 at 02:17
Does this answer your question? Indicating joint first authorship through special markup in biblatex/biber — helmingstay, Dec 18 '22 at 02:18
@helmingstay -- The question you cite uses biblatex for its answer. The present question asks about bibtex. — barbara beeton, Dec 18 '22 at 06:00

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 17 '15 at 10:41

There is no 'standard' way of indicating this information in a .bib file. Moreover, it probably would be difficult to include it in the author field without breaking standard styles/sorting/... As such, if adding this information I would use a custom field (the BibTeX format allows for this as all non-recognised fields are ignored).

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 22 '15 at 21:59

1

Quick solution that may work for you: keep things together with parentheses.

author={{Foo, Bar} and third_author and fourth_author},

answered Apr 22 '15 at 21:59

rvaneijk

330

5

How do you propose to tell BibTeX about the first names of the authors? – Jun 22 '15 at 01:16

Equal contribution (co-first authors) in BibTeX

2 Answers2

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