biblatex - citing dead author

Question

I'd like to put

author={{\textdagger}Last, First},

in some bibtex entries, and have biblatex treat it exactly as some existing

author={Last, First},

entries (i.e. sorted as if the dagger was not there, treated as identical to Last for dashing etc.).

Is this possible?

In biblatex, that's what sortname is for. author = {Author, Adam}, sortname = {Smith, John}, sorts under 'Smith, John'. You can even override that if you like by adding a sortkey = {ZZZZZ}, which would sort it under 'ZZZZZ'. And you can also override that by adding a presort field... — jon, Mar 04 '14 at 15:57
Thanks for that; it does make the sort order right, but it does not treat Last the same as †Last in citations in the text, because it thinks "†Last, First" is a different author from "Last, First" and so requires disambiguating (i.e. I get "F. Last (2014)" when "Last (2014)" would already be unambiguous). — KeithB, Mar 04 '14 at 16:25
Wouldn't they be different authors? Either someone is dead or alive... — jon, Mar 04 '14 at 16:35
Normal practice is to cite people exactly as in the source document. So if some articles have Last and some more recent ones have †Last, I should keep the † in some of my citations, but in all other respects treat the two cases as the same person. — KeithB, Mar 04 '14 at 16:41
@jon - Maybe we're discovering an author category called a "Schrödinger's Author" -- neither dead nor alive until his/her name is written out to a bibliography... — Mico, Mar 04 '14 at 19:27
I would look at the nosort option of biber which is designed for this. See the PDF biber manual as this option has to be set in the biber config file. — PLK, Mar 05 '14 at 18:56

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 04 '14 at 16:37

Here is an alternative, which enables you to use an option dead to mark that an author has died. It then adds the dagger on the first occurrence of the author's name. This may allow more "logical" markup of the .bib database.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{living,
  author = {Last, Alpha},
  title = {I'm Alive},
  date = {2014}
}
@book{dead,
  author = {Last, First},
  title = {Dead},
  options = {dead},
  date = {2014},
}
@book{dead2,
  author = {Last, First},
  title = {Still Dead},
  options = {dead},
  date = {2014}
}
@book{notalive,
  author = {Last, Last},
  title = {Not Alive},
  options = {dead},
  date = {2014}
}
@book{alive:not,
  author = {Last, Last},
  title = {Not Alive},
  options = {dead},
  date = {2014}
}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\newtoggle{riptoggle}
\DeclareEntryOption{dead}[true]{\settoggle{riptoggle}{#1}}
\AtEveryBibitem{\usebibmacro{bbx:dashcheck}
        {}
        {\iftoggle{riptoggle}
           {\textdagger}
           {}}}

\begin{document}

\nocite{*}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

enter image description here

Thanks for this - I might be able to use something like this, but please remember that the problem is not to add † to every article published after the author has died, but to cite articles correctly. It should be cited with † iff it's published with †. — KeithB, Mar 05 '14 at 10:39
@KeithB Are you okay with the output though if dashed=false is activated? — moewe, Mar 06 '14 at 11:18

biblatex - citing dead author

1 Answers1

Linked