Bibtex author name - unusual use case

Question

I need to cite a paper whose author apparently wishes to be known as "A.James Hancock" (I changed the actual name). How do I get the abbrv style to produce that? I keep getting A.Hancock.

Answer 1

The abbrv style abbreviates names, as its name implies, so it's indifferent what name the author wants to be used.

With

@article{key,
author={Hancock, A. James},
title={Title},
journal={Journal},
year=2000,
}

the entry in the bibliography would be

[1] A. J. Hancock. Title. Journal, 2000.

You're probably inputting A.James without a space, so the abbreviated form will be "A.", as for BibTeX there is only one (peculiar) first name.

With the plain bibliography style you would get, from the same entry,

[1] A. James Hancock. Title. Journal, 2000.

Answer 2

If you're willing to switch to biblatex, here's how to disable its firstinits option for a single entry. (Note that style=numeric,firstinits=true is the biblatex equivalent to abbrv.bst.)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[style=numeric,firstinits=true]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{Han12,
  execute = {\togglefalse{blx@firstinits}},
  author = {Hancock, A. James},
  year = {2012},
  title = {An unusual use case},
}
@book{Lam85,
  author = {Lamport, Leslie},
  year = {1985},
  title = {\LaTeX: A document preparation system},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\nocite{*}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}