In my field it is common to have shared first authorship for authors who “contributed equally to the work” (as shared first authorship is usually defined). The “proper” way of citing publications with shared first authors is to mention all first authors (not just the first first one1).
Now, normally the citation style for authordate
-like formats is along the lines of:
Doe, Jane et al. (1995), “Title”. In: Journal
Whereby the subsequent authors are elided2. However, with shared first authors, the citation should look like this:
Jane Doe, Fred Foo et al. (1995), “Title”. In: Journal
I have two (related) questions concerning this:
- How do I accomplish this citation style in LaTeX using BibLaTeX?
- How do I even mark shared first authors in the source
*.bib
file?
The second question is a corollary of the first, since it is my understanding that in a “normal” *.bib
file the author
field is simply an ordered list, with no means of indicating contribution.
I’m particularly interested in how to accomplish this for biblatex
’ authoryear
style; however, I’m also interested in a more general solution with full author lists (in which joint first authors could e.g. be marked by an asterisk).
1 And this is actually quite important, although disappointingly few publications get it right, because if not done, it skews authorship for the purpose of text mining, and unfairly withholds the equal contributions of the co-first authors.
2 Unless there are very few (e.g. < 3), in which case it’s common to cite them all.
3em
or so in length) when the authors are 'the same'. In citations (and reference lists), it has implications for whether to start using (say) 2006a and 2006b, and so on: when the authors are not the same, then each would just be 2006. Generally speaking, it is good to keep in mind what happens in extreme cases when it comes to bibliographies in order to avoid mediocre, ad hoc solutions that will fail for the next person. (Not that that's your goal!)secondaryauthors
that contains the secondary authors. This way one could make sure that only the primary authors are cited in the text, and the secondary authors can appear in the bibliography. If you then however also want the secondary authors to be citable with all the normalbiblatex
benefits (uniquename
etc.) that would require some work especially if one wants these to be applied full author list and not the "primary" and "secondary" part individually.