Highlight one entry in bibtex

Question

In my bibliography, which I'm writing using bibtex, I'd like to highlight a special item and place it on the top of the bibliography, even though I'm using chronological order (sorting=ynt), since it's the main reference of my girlfriend's thesis. Is there any way to do it?

Some additional information: I'm using memoir as the document class, I'm including biblatex as this:

\usepackage[
    backend=bibtex,
    citestyle=verbose-ibid,
    style=verbose-ibid,
    sorting=ynt
]{biblatex}

and I'm including the bibliography like this:

\printbibliography

Thanks

Unrelated: I don't recommend using backend=bibtex with biblatex any more. You should use biber. But what you're asking seems like a very odd thing to do. But it's common to separate things into primary and secondary sources, and this is easy to do with biblatex. See Simple way of setting up two bibliographies and biblatex: separating publications of a specific author in the bibliography. The latter approach can be applied to any category, not just authors. — Alan Munn, May 23 '17 at 00:04
I second Alan's comment as to this being odd (I'd say it would probably be harder, not easier, to find it). But if you really want to have the thesis first in an otherwise chronological bibliography, you could try the sortyear entryfield, setting, let's say, sortyear = {1500}, in your girlfriend's thesis bibentry. — gusbrs, May 23 '17 at 03:06

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '17 at 07:03

You can use sortkey or presort to sort a particular entry before all others. With sorting=nyt you could use presort={0}.

@book{aardvark,
  author = {Aardvark, Anne},
  titel  = {Now, this is Aardvark},
  year   = {2012},
}
@book{wombat,
  author  = {Wombat, Wilbur},
  titel   = {This is Wombat},
  year    = {2017},
  presort = {0},
}

I can, however, not recommend just (seemingly arbitrarily) seamlessly sorting one entry out of order before all others.

You could instead split the bibliography.

Statically via keywords in the .bib file

@book{aardvark,
  author   = {Aardvark, Anne},
  titel    = {Now, this is Aardvark},
  year     = {2012},
  keywords = {secondary},
}
@book{wombat,
  author   = {Wombat, Wilbur},
  titel    = {This is Wombat},
  year     = {2017},
  keywords = {primary},
}

and filter

\printbibheading
\printbibliography[keyword=primary, heading=subbibliography, title={Primary}]
\printbibliography[keyword=secondary, heading=subbibliography, title={Secondary}]

You could also only set keywords for primary and filter all others via notkeyword.

\printbibliography[keyword=primary]
\printbibliography[notkeyword=primary]

Or dynamically via categories

\DeclareBibliographyCategory{important}
\addtocategory{important}{wombat}

\printbibheading
\printbibliography[category=important, heading=subbibliography, title={Primary}]
\printbibliography[notcategory=important, heading=subbibliography, title={Secondary}]

There are even more possibilities to split the bibliography, for example by author biblatex: separating publications of a specific author in the bibliography

Highlight one entry in bibtex

1 Answers1