Display list of authors of all citations

Question

I'm using biblatex (with bibtex as backend) to generate a bibliography. The citations in bibtex format originate from a variety of websites (ACM, IEEE, DBLP), meaning the authors are not always presented in the same format (e.g., one entry may specify Firstname Lastname while another refers to the same author as Lastname, Firstname).

While the bibliography style deals with most of these inconsistencies, I've found that in some cases, the same author is referred to in multiple ways. That is, the same author is referred to as "F. M. Lastname" in one citation, but as "F. Lastname" in another.

My goal is to detect any of these occurrences and fix them manually. One way to achieve this would be to print a list of all authors from all citations and sort them alphabetically. Does biblatex provide a way to do this?

Answer 1

A good way to solve this is to use an author index. This will print all authors from all publications sorted by their last name. If multiple names are used for the same person, they will show up next to each other in this list.

A minimal working example to demonstrate this concept:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=ieee,citestyle=numeric-comp,natbib=true,backend=bibtex,url=false,doi=false,isbn=false,useprefix=true,autocite=inline,sortcites=true,labelnumber=true,urldate=long,indexing=bib]{biblatex}
\usepackage{makeidx}\makeindex
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{fl,
  author = {Lastname, Firstname},
  year = {2001},
  title = {My first paper}
}
@misc{fml,
  author = {Firstname Middle Lastname},
  year = {2002},
  title = {My second paper}
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\printindex
\end{document}

This results in the following index:

To compile, add the command makeindex.

An alternative is the following:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=ieee,citestyle=numeric-comp,natbib=true,backend=bibtex,url=false,doi=false,isbn=false,useprefix=true,autocite=inline,sortcites=true,labelnumber=true,urldate=long,indexing=bib]{biblatex}
\usepackage{authorindex}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{fl,
  author = {Lastname, Firstname},
  year = {2001},
  title = {My first paper}
}
@misc{fml,
  author = {Firstname Middle Lastname},
  year = {2002},
  title = {My second paper}
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\aicite{*}
\printbibliography
\printauthorindex
\end{document}

This results in a very similar index that doesn't include the titles of the publications in the index. To compile, use the authorindex command.