How to enter German author's name as bibtex key

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1

An author’s last name is Gschl{"o}{\ss}l, which JabRef-3.8.2 accepts in the author field. But this is rejected in the bibtex key field. JabRef accepts Gschlossl, but not with the umlaut and sharp s. Is there a way to enter the name as she spells it as the key?

Thanks,

Rich

2

Rich,

Thanks for citing authors not willing to translate their names into ASCII compatible strings. She might actually be Austrian or Bavarian. But where is the problem if the bibtex key is a little different from the real author’s name?

Best,
Axel

3

Axel,

OK, I should have written ‘Germanic language’ author.

If there’s a discrepancy between the spelling in the citation and the
reference section it might confuse readers. I was surprised that JabRef (or
is it bibtex itself?) accepts the use of braces in an author’s name but not
the citation key.

Rich

4

Both BibTeX and BibLaTeX are relatively strict in their handling of special characters in the citation key and it is in general best to restrict oneself to simple alpha-numerical letters. This is why JabRef displays a warning. In the case Gschl{"o}{\ss}l you mention, the key Gschloessl is valid and shouldn’t lead to confusions (the citation key is usually not shown in the PDF anyway).
That being said, I think newer JabRef versions (4.0 and later) might even accept keys with special characters.

5

Tobias,

Yes, I did translate the Germanic characters to their ASCII equivalents.
My citations use author-year, not numbers.

Rich

6

We recently added a check to prevent illegal characters in bibtex keys. Since biber or bibtex may not like them.