How to make author-specific citations with BibTeX?

Question

I'm preparing a document with 100+ references, all sourced from a single .bib file. Many -- but not all -- of the references are articles previously written by me and/or some of my current co-authors. We would like these to appear differently in the generated bibliography: preferably using boldface for the citation number, both in the main text and in the (plain-style) bibliography.

Just defining a new command (\mcite is what we call it) as \textbf{\cite[#1]} works for the in-text part, but of course, doesn't affect the appearance of the bibliography at all.

So far, we've used BibTeX and simple styles, like plain. I've looked through the documentation for BibTeX & biblatex, as well as natbib. Nothing seems to address this; can it be done?

Answer 1

Here a suggestion with biblatex in combination with biber.

I used the command \DeclareSourcemap to find all bib entries from Knuth and add them a keyword. This keyword is used for detection in \DeclareFieldFormat{labelnumberwidth}:

% !TEX program = arara
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: biber
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
%: Start Header
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[style=numeric,maxnames=6,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\nocite{*}
\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
    \map{
      \step[fieldsource=author,
            match=\regexp{Knuth},
            final]
      \step[fieldset=keywords, fieldvalue=knuth]
    }
  }
}
\DeclareFieldFormat{labelnumberwidth}{%
  \ifkeyword{knuth}{\textbf{\mkbibbrackets{#1}}}{\mkbibbrackets{#1}}}
\begin{document}
text
\printbibliography

\end{document}