Smart key generation for duplicated citation key

Features
1

Now I duplicated key add “a”,“b”,“c” after the key.

However I want to propose more clever way to deal with duplicated keys.

So one designates 2 key generating option
EX) 1. author(3) year(2)
2. author(3) year(2) abbreviated journal

which is inclusive.

Now generate keys by first rule
and if there is duplication, generate keys by second rule for that duplicated things.

And for completeness one add “a”,“b”,“c” If second rule is not enough.
(I doubt that there will be same ones from example rules but for the completeness)

By this one, one will remember keys more easily and have integration from other bib file.

2

I think @ThiloteE recently had some ideas about this as well.

PS:
Your post was flagged as spam and I had to remove the poll option to get your post working.
So here it is.

Please vote if you support this proposal:

  • I would like to have this feature, too!
  • I don’t care.

0 voters

3

The more I think about it, having either the ISBN or DOI as default citationkey might make lots of sense too, if avoiding similar looking citekeys is the goal. That is also the best, if the bibtex database goes missing and users only have a backup of their latex file, because they then can very easily find the article.

JabRef has a nice duplicate detection feature and will indeed avoid duplicate citekeys, but when authors have similar names or there are multiple articles from the same year, sometimes the citekey can look very similar and albeit this should be very rare, some users of JabRef may by accident choose the wrong article.

4

Thanks.

Since this is my first post, I can’t understand the posting system(spam or vote) right now.

Sorry for my English level also.

My intension was making fall back options for duplication.

Maybe 2 options or possibly 3 options for avoiding “a”,“b”,“c”, although “a”,“b”,“c”, would be needed to avoid error.

As @ThiloteE says ISBN or DOI as citation key might good for avoiding duplication.
However author&year is kind of default rule in my area and It is really good with memory. Also, much harder gen key is not good with co-working. It seems not reasonable to give up such good option because of few duplication.
For those few duplication, if we can give another rules, it seems reasonable to me.