Search for just the first author

Help
1

In a big library how to search for papers by just the first author name. What should the serach term look like in this case?

2

Hi,
JabRef does not really have a special field for firstAuthor; you would need to use regex:

Considering the author field looks like this:
Ding, Eric L. and Hutfless, Susan M. and Ding, Xin and Girotra, Saket

you would need regex (enable the regex mode in search)
Searches where the author starts with Ding and can contain whitespace at the start and after the name
author =~ ^\s*Ding\s*,

You can find more info under Organize | JabRef

3

The easiest way to search by first author is with citationkey= or citationkey=~, unless @FredStroh has customized the key pattern to something that doesn’t include the first author name. citationkey is easier to search than author even when there is only one author name, because the search doesn’t require any adaptation for LaTeX expressions, institutional author names, or stray spaces. Just type citationkey=ding.

  1. [auth]: The last name of the first author
  2. [authFirstFull]: Get the von part and last name of the first author