biblatex: Customise individual labels in bibliography section

Question

Using biblatex, I would like to manually adjust some few labels (I mean: [1], [2]) in the bibliography section and the text body of the document.

The same question was posed for bibtex, see Customizing individual biblabels? while I am interested in a solution for biblatex.

The idea is that all own publications are indicated as [P1], [P2] etc.

[P1] Gladstone Gander. How to be lucky. Nature, 42:1-33, 2001.

while all other publications are indicated as [3], [4] etc.

[2] Donald Duck and Fethry Duck. How to be unlucky. Nature, 43:34-44, 2002.

Then, one could use \nocite{} at the beginning of the mainmatter to make sure that all own publications appear on the top of the bibliography section and that numbering of all other references continues with the next integer number.

In case that might be helpful, I load biblatex as:

\usepackage[style=numeric-verb,backend=bibtex,sorting=none,sortcites=true,firstinits=true,isbn=false,maxcitenames=99,bibencoding=latin1]{biblatex}

Thanks in advance for some hints!

Answer 1

This is actually surprisingly easy. You will just have to have a way to distinguish those entries with a modified label. There are at least two ways to do that, the two ways are fundamentally different though.

Use keywords, you can just add keywords = {modlabel} to the .bib entry and filter the bibliography with keyword=modlabel and notkeyword=modlabel. In this case, you will decide in the .bib file whether an entry is to have the modified numbering or not.

When you use a bibliography category approach, this decision is delayed and only made in the actual .tex document. We define a bibliography category

\DeclareBibliographyCategory{modlabel}

Add the respective entries to this category via \addtocategory{modlabel}{<key>} and filter the bibliography with category=modlabel and notcategory=modlabel.

You will have to load biblatex with the defernumbers=true option for both approaches to work properly.

The bibliography for the prefixed entries is then printed in a new refcontext with option labelprefix=P.

MWE (which uses bibliography categories)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[british]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=numeric-verb, backend=bibtex, sorting=none, defernumbers=true]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\DeclareBibliographyCategory{modlabel}
\addtocategory{modlabel}{cicero,geer}
\begin{document}
\nocite{geer,wilde,cicero,markey,aristotle:physics,aristotle:rhetoric}
\begin{refcontext}[labelprefix=P]
\printbibliography[category=modlabel]
\end{refcontext}
\printbibliography[notcategory=modlabel,heading=none]
\end{document}

---

In order to avoid the slightly increased spacing between the two \printbibliographys add the following to your preamble

\defbibenvironment{bibliography}
  {}
  {}
  {\item}
\newenvironment{spacedbib}
  {\list
     {\printtext[labelnumberwidth]{%
        \printfield{labelprefix}%
        \printfield{labelnumber}}}
     {\setlength{\labelwidth}{\labelnumberwidth}%
      \setlength{\leftmargin}{\labelwidth}%
      \setlength{\labelsep}{\biblabelsep}%
      \addtolength{\leftmargin}{\labelsep}%
      \setlength{\itemsep}{\bibitemsep}%
      \setlength{\parsep}{\bibparsep}}%
      \renewcommand*{\makelabel}[1]{\hss##1}}
  {\endlist}

And enclose the \pritntbibliograpy commands in this new spacedbib environment like so

\begin{spacedbib}
\begin{refcontext}[labelprefix=P]
\printbibliography[category=modlabel]
\end{refcontext}
\printbibliography[notcategory=modlabel,heading=none]
\end{spacedbib}