How to specify bibliography alpha key without modifying the .bst file or using BibLaTeX

Question

How do you tell LaTeX which alpha key to give a bibliography entry without modifying the .bst file?

Example: I want an entry with

author = {no one 910 (StackOverflow User 118593)}

to appear as [StO17], instead of [noSU17].

Working tex file:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
Hereby I cite \cite{myself}.

\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{bibliography}
\end{document}

bibliography.bib:

@misc{myself,
  author = {no one 910 (StackOverflow User 118593)},
  title = {{StackOverflow Answer}},
  howpublished = "https://stackoverflow.com",
  year = {2017}
}

Output:

This question and your answer are completely unclear to me. What exactly are you trying to do? Can you add an actual compilable document that shows what you're doing? — Alan Munn, Jul 03 '17 at 19:10
It is really unclear to me what is going on here? What do you want to do? What is your set-up? Do you even use biblatex, or do you use natbib, BibTeX? As it stands now your question and answer is quite unlikely to help future visitors. — moewe, Jul 04 '17 at 05:01
I think your question is a duplicate of this: Customize appearence of citation of a specific bibliographic entry when using the alpha bibliography style. — Alan Munn, Jul 04 '17 at 16:52
Theoretically yes, but I am not allowed to change the citation style in my situation. Maybe should've added that to the title. — yspreen, Jul 04 '17 at 16:56

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 04 '17 at 17:19

2

This would be very easy with biblatex:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{myself,
    shorthand = {StO17},
  author = {no one 910 (StackOverflow User 118593)},
  title = {{StackOverflow Answer}},
  howpublished = "https://stackoverflow.com",
  year = {2017}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\usepackage[style=alphabetic]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
Hereby I cite \cite{myself}.

\printbibliography
\end{document}

answered Jul 04 '17 at 17:19

samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz

158,329

I know! Sadly this does not fit my requirements. I must not use BibLaTeX. – yspreen Jul 05 '17 at 11:58
Additionaly, the year is kind of redundant in this situation, no? – yspreen Jul 07 '17 at 15:19

yspreen · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-04T16:50:32.463

Since nobody wants to do things the proper way, here is a hack:

This works only with Authors that do not contain a word that starts with a lower-case letter
Append \Bibkeyhack StO to your author, with StO being the key.

Command definition: (That's all!)

\newcommand{\Bibkeyhack}[3]{}

If you want keys with a different length, replace 3 with your length.
For 1. there is a workaround:

\newcommand{\SmallHack}[1]{\lowercase{#1}}

Notice that both commands start upper-case, so that rule 1. is not violated.

Working example:

author = {\SmallHack No \SmallHack One 910 (StackOverflow User 118593)\Bibkeyhack StO}

Which will result in [StO17]: no one 910. Image proof:

Important: If you put a space between ) and \Bibkeyhack, the result will look like this:

Complete tex file:

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand{\SmallHack}[1]{\lowercase{#1}}
\newcommand{\Bibkeyhack}[3]{}
\begin{document}
Hereby I cite \cite{myself}.

\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{bibliography}
\end{document}

bibliography.bib:

@misc{myself,
  author = {\SmallHack No \SmallHack One 910 (StackOverflow User 118593)\Bibkeyhack StO},
  title = {{StackOverflow Answer}},
  howpublished = "https://stackoverflow.com",
  year = {2017}
}

Output:

How to specify bibliography alpha key without modifying the .bst file or using BibLaTeX

2 Answers2

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