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I am wirting a CV template that uses biblatex, and would like to make the authour field optional. If you are the sole authour of an aricle, and put it on your CV under ''publications'', it is pretty obvious that you are the authour and feels redundant to write your own name there. However, if there are multiple authours it makes sense to list the authours.

So my question is: is there a way to make all the mandatory authour/editor fields optional for all entry types?

Here is a MWE:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{xcolor}
\definecolor{soft}{rgb}{0.45,0.45,0.45}
\newcommand{\softbullet}{\textcolor{soft}{\small\textbullet}\hspace{0.5em}}


\usepackage[%
        backend=biber,
        style=authoryear,
        sorting=ydnt,
        hyperref=auto
    ]{biblatex}


\renewcommand{\bibsetup}{\vspace*{-\baselineskip}}
\AtEveryBibitem{\makebox[\bibhang][l]{\softbullet}}
\setlength{\bibitemsep}{0.25\baselineskip}


\usepackage{hyperref}


\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{sample.bib}
@article{einstein,
    author = "Albert Einstein",
    title = "{Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K{"o}rper}. ({German})
    [{On} the electrodynamics of moving bodies]",
    journal = "Annalen der Physik",
    volume = "322",
    number = "10",
    pages = "891--921",
    year = "1905",
    DOI = "http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/andp.19053221004",
}


@book{dirac,
    title = {The Principles of Quantum Mechanics},
    author = {Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac},
    isbn = {9780198520115},
    series = {International series of monographs on physics},
    year = {1981},
    publisher = {Clarendon Press},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{sample.bib}


\begin{document}


Foo baz baa


\nocite{*}


\printbibliography


\end{document}

Alternativley, maybe there could be some way to surpress the authour field in the bibliography for an entry?

why not just use the misc entry? Because I sort the bibliography in the template by entry type. i.e. \printbibliography[type=article,heading={Articles}], \printbibliography[type=thesis,title={Theses}], etc. Also, some fields are not covered by misc. For example, inbook has more optional fields than misc:

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Side note: what sorting and bibliography style is best for a CV?

Vebjorn
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    I think it is rather common to include your own name on your CV publications list, also for single-author publications. I do that too for my own CV, and I have to say it looks very nice to see your own name all throughout the list :) and on a more serious note, a committee checking your CV during a job application will also see your name many times, which might help your application forward. – Marijn Oct 25 '22 at 18:54

1 Answers1

1

It might come as a surprise to many who read the documentation and see "required" and "optional" fields, but in practice there is no stark distinction between the two.

In particular only the data model validation code (which is only used if you run Biber with the -V/--validate-datamodel flag) really 'knows' this distinction. In the remainder of the code it is more of an underlying assumption (upon which various styles may rely to varying degrees).

I think it makes sense to think of the required set of fields as the minimum information you should provide for the entry to work nicely with all biblatex standard styles (and most contributed styles). If you give all required fields, your entry should always produce sensible output. If you don't give all required fields, the output might (and in many cases will) still be OK, but there might be some rough edges (e.g. if you use an author-year style and have no author and no editor, then biblatex may have to fall back to mentioning the title instead in citations).

Specifically, the biblatex documentation says

Note that the ‘required’ fields are not strictly required in all cases, see §2.3.2 for details. The fields marked as ‘optional’ are optional in a technical sense. Bibliographical formatting rules usually require more than just the ‘required’ fields.

about 'required' and 'optional' fields. And §2.3.2 further explains

§2.3.2 Missing and Omissible Data

The fields marked as ‘required’ in §2.1.1 are not strictly required in all cases. The bibliography styles which come with this package can get by with as little as a title field for most entry types. A book published anonymously, a periodical without an explicit editor, or a software manual without an explicit author should pose no problem as far as the bibliography is concerned. Citation styles, however, may have different requirements. For example, an author-year citation scheme obviously requires an author/editor and a year field.

So by all means leave out required fields if you think it makes sense, but check the output and make sure you like what you see.

No formal procedure is needed to be able to omit required fields (unless you want to avoid the warning during data model validation: Silence biber datamodel warning about missing field).

See also How to cite report-like documents that do not have/need an institution? and BibLaTeX required fields delimited with a slash.

Specifically for publication lists in a CV you may want to have a look at https://ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-publist, which allows you to highlight your name in the author field or to suppress it. See for example Biblatex without some authors, With biblatex, replace all authors after a specific author with 'et al.'.

moewe
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