Limiting number of middle names in bibliography

Question

I am working on a bibliography where the entries are supposed to look like this:

Slager CJ, Wentzel JJ, Gijsen FJ, Schuurbiers JC, van der Wal AC, van der Steen AF, Serruys PW. The role of shear stress in the generation of rupture-prone vulnerable plaques. Nat Clin Pract Cardiovasc Med. 2005; 2:401-407.

I know that by activating the options giveninits and terseinits I can get the initials without dots that I need. However, there also is a limit of two initials per author that I may not exceed. For the example above, the bib-file looks like this:

@ARTICLE{slager.2005,
    author ={C. J. Slager and J. J. Wentzel and F. J. H. Gijsen and J. C. H. Schuurbiers and A. C. van der Wal and A. F. W. van der Steen and P. W. Serruys},
    title = {The role of shear stress in the generation of rupture-prone vulnerable plaques},
    journal = NCPCM,
    date = {2005},
    volume = {2},
    number = {8},
    pages = {401-407}
    }

Currently, I end up with Slager CJ, Wentzel JJ, Gijsen FJH, Schuurbiers JCH, van der Wal AC, van der Steen AFW, Serruys PW (three authors exceeding the limit). Somehow, I must get rid of all middle names after the first one, so I can keep the limit of two initials. What would be the best way to do this with biblatex?

Answer 1

You could try something like this -- but as you didn't provide a complete example, I couldn't test if it works with your style.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[terseinits,giveninits,maxnames=99]{biblatex}

\renewcommand\mkbibnamegiven[1]{{#1}}
\renewrobustcmd*{\bibinitdelim}{\def\bibinitdelim##1\bibinitperiod{}}

\addbibresource{test.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{slager.2005}
\printbibliography

\end{document}

Answer 2

It is best to deal with this at source. biblatex 3.5/biber 2.6 (currently in DEV on Sourceforge) have an extended name format where you can specify the initials explicitly and so you could do this:

AUTHOR = {C. J. Slager and J. J. Wentzel and given=F. J. H., given-i=F. J., family=Gijsen and given=J. C. H., given-i=J. C., family=Schuurbiers and A. C. van der Wal and given=A. F. W., given-i=A. F., prefix=van der, family=Steen and P. W. Serruys}

Here, just using the extended format for those names where you want to explicitly set the initials to only two names. Alternatively, if you don't want to change the data source, you could do this with a sourcemap by putting something like this in your preamble (this should work with the current biblatex):

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
    \map{
       \step[fieldsource=author,
             match=\regexp{([A-Z]\.\s*[A-Z]\.)\s*[A-Z]\.},
             replace=\regexp{$1}]
    }
  }
}

The exact regexp(s) will depend on your data, for example, if the names are always only given with initials in the data, then it's easier but could also been done for full names, depending on the format.