Show only first word of parenthetical citation in BibLaTeX

Question

Standard MLA style is to display only the first word of a parenthetical citation. For example, a citation of "Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition" would be displayed only as (Encyclopedia).

I can remove any other authors and the "et al." suffix with

\usepackage[maxcitenames=1,uniquename=init,uniquelist=false]{biblatex}
\DefineBibliographyStrings{english}{andothers=\unskip} % delete et al.

However, I can't figure out how to prevent a citation such as \cite{britannica} from appearing as (Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition); the desired output would be simply (Encyclopedia) (or possibly (Britannica)).

How can I accomplish this in BibLaTeX?

Answer 1

biblatex's shortauthor field can be used to abbreviate long (especially corporate) authors.

The biblatex documentation states on p. 30 (§2.3.3 Corporate Authors and Editors)

Corporate authors and editors are given in the author or editor field, respectively. Note that they must be wrapped in an extra pair of curly braces to prevent data parsing from treating them as personal names which are to be dissected into their components. Use the shortauthor field if you want to give an abbreviated form of the name or an acronym for use in citations.

author = {{National Aeronautics and Space Administration}},
shortauthor = {NASA},

The default citation styles will use the short name in all citations while the full name is printed in the bibliography.

While on page 21, we find

shortauthor list (name): The author(s) of the work, given in an abbreviated form. This field is mainly intended for abbreviated forms of corporate authors[...].

---

There is also the shorthand option, which will not replace the name part of citation, but the whole citation label.

shorthand field (literal): A special designation to be used by the citation style instead of the usual label. This field is intended for citation aliasing. If defined, it overrides the default label. (p. 22 of the documentation)

---

Compare the output for the following .bib file (with authoryear)

@book{EBSH,
  author    = {{Encyclopedia Britannica Shorthand Edition}},
  shorthand = {EB},
  title     = {EB With Shorthand},
  year      = {2014},
  publisher = {Shorthand Press},
  location  = {Global},
}
@book{EBSA,
  author      = {{Encyclopedia Britannica Shortauthor Edition}},
  shortauthor = {Britannica},
  title       = {EB With Shortauthor},
  year        = {2014},
  publisher   = {Shorthand Press},
  location    = {Global},
}

MWE

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{EBSH,
  author    = {{Encyclopedia Britannica Shorthand Edition}},
  shorthand = {EB},
  title     = {EB With Shorthand},
  year      = {2014},
  publisher = {Shorthand Press},
  location  = {Global},
}
@book{EBSA,
  author      = {{Encyclopedia Britannica Shortauthor Edition}},
  shortauthor = {Britannica},
  title       = {EB With Shortauthor},
  year        = {2014},
  publisher   = {Shorthand Press},
  location    = {Global},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
  \cite{EBSH,EBSA}
  \printbibliography
\end{document}