Short harvard citation?

Question

I need to cite the following way:

The first 3 Letters of the author + the year.

Example:

Kemper 2009 --> [Kem09]

But I don't have any clue how to do that!

Answer 1

This is the standard with biblatex’s style alphabetic, as long as you have one author. With multiple authors, this style takes the first letter of every author – up to three, as a default. If there are more than three authors, it takes the first three letters of the first name, then a + and the year, e.g.

Kemper 2009 > [Kem09]

Goossens, Mittelbach and Samarin 1994 > [GSM94]

Kemper et al. 2011 > [Kem+11]

Edit:

As Audrey stated in the comments, you can change the name of the authors that are used for the alphabetic label with the option maxalphanames. With maxalphanames=1, the above examples would look like this:

Kemper 2009 > [Kem09]

Goossens, Mittelbach and Samarin 1994 > [Goo+94]

Kemper et al. 2011 > [Kem+11]

If you want to get rid of the +, you can redefine the \labelalphaothers command: \renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}