A good way to put a "with" connective in the author field of BibTeX

Question

I want to add this book to BibTeX. The author's preference is to have it appear as follows:

\bibitem[Lyons with Peres (2014)]{LP:book}
\bibauthor{Lyons, R. {\rm with} Peres, Y.} (2014).
\newblock {\em Probability on Trees and Networks}.
\newblock Cambridge University Press.
\newblock In preparation. Current
  version available at \hfil\break
  {\tt http://pages.iu.edu/\string~rdlyons/}.

Is there a nice way to add the "with" to the author field? By "nice way", I mean I can put in their full names into the BibTeX entry and let the style file decide whether to use the full name or just use a first initial.

Answer 1

Is this "with" just a research-field specific way of saying "and": Lyons, R. and Peres, Y. = Lyons, R. with Peres, Y.; and probably Lyons, R., Bolds, A. and Peres, Y. = Lyons, R., Bolds, A. with Peres, Y.

In that case you would have to redefine the author separator that is used by bibtex and your bibstyle. If you use bibtex you could produce a useful citation style with makebst. Otherwise you could try to change that specific bit in an existing bst-file, but thats a bit complicated. I do not know by heart how that separator is called, maybe you find something in the internet.

However, you cannot use the author field for such constructions. This field is a list, and the word "and" is defined as the only accepted boolean that separates authors. Every other word in this field is interpreted as belonging to the current name.

If you really have lots of such things I would recommend switching to biblatex. But if this "with" is something special and not your general alternative for "and" in all cases I doubt if even that system is able to do that (it would certainly not be achieved easily).