Customising key patterns for citation keys

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1

Hi,

I’m looking to customise the key patterns for generating citation keys, but I can’t see if it’s possible to get the results I want.

I’m looking for the citation keys to be the first two letters of each author name, followed by a colon and the short date.

So, for example, this paper would have citation key Wi:95, and this paper would have citation key CaErPo:83.

I’m not sure if what I want to do is possible, but if it is, I’d appreciate some help as to how to do it!

Thanks!

2

Hi,
have you checked the documentation? See also the hint on the pressing of enter.
Your pattern would be somehow a combination of
[ authIniN ] : The beginning of each author’s last name, using no more than N characters.
And
[ shortyear ] : The last 2 digits of the publication year

https://docs.jabref.org/setup/citationkeypatterns

3

Unfortunately, in this case the documentation is misleading for [authIniN].
@Siedlerchr I’ll try to update the documentation this week.

I don’t think it is possible to do for an arbitrary number of authors, however, [authN_M] returns an empty string if the author does not exist, so chaining 5+ of those should cover most use cases (something like [auth2_1][auth2_2]...)

1 Like
4

Thanks.

I wasn’t sure if it was possible to use some regex-fu to get what I wanted from [authors], but I may just need to investigate that a bit further myself.

It’s really helpful to know that [authN_M] is empty when the author doesn’t exist though - thanks.