BibTeX handling of the Dutch "van" name prefix with natbib

Question

I want to produce the following with LaTeX/BibTeX:

In the running text:

... we refer the reader to the work of Van Noort (2010).

In the bibliography:

Thomas van Noort. An important paper. 2010.

I have tried many tricks, but I don't seem to able to fulfill all the requirements:

1. "Thomas van Noort" has to appear sorted in the bibliography by the name "Noort".
2. In the running text, the "Van" needs to have an uppercase 'V'
3. In the bibliography, the "van" needs to have a lowercase 'v'
4. I am using hyperref, and I want the whole "Van Noort (2010)" text to link to the reference.

Using plain \citet will generate:

... we refer the reader to the work of van Noort (2010).

Note the lowercase 'v'; this is not acceptable, as per standard treatment of Dutch names. Setting the BibTeX name to Van Noort, Thomas makes the running text citation look ok, but then in the bibliography I get

Thomas Van Noort. An important paper. 2010.

Note the uppercase 'V'; this is also not acceptable, as it should only be uppercase if it is not preceded by the first name.

(1) is easy: I set the BibTeX author field to {\noopsort{Noort}}{van Noort}, Thomas. (2) and (3) I can fake by saying something like we refer the reader to the work of Van Noort \citeyear{...}, but this is not nice, and does not fulfill (4).

Anyone has any suggestions? I was under the impression that LaTeX and BibTeX were designed with these kind of things in mind, so maybe I'm missing something...

Answer 1

A working scheme seems to be

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[authoryear]{natbib}
\usepackage{hyperref}

% #1: sorting key, #2: prefix for citation, #3: prefix for bibliography
\DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#2} % set up for citation

\begin{document}
\citet{vannoort}
\citet{other}

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}

% here we change the meaning of \VAN to use the prefix for the bibliography
\DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#3}

\bibliography{vannoort}
\end{document}

where the entry in the .bib file is

@article{vannoort,
author={{\VAN{Noort}{Van}{van}} Noort, Thomas},
title={An important paper},
year=2010,
}

In the first argument to \VAN you can put anything you need to ensure correct sorting.

---

A couple of words, as asked by Florian Rubach.

To BibTeX, something like {\command{something}} is like an "accent"; usually one does {\"{u}} to get sorting of ü like "u" (which may not be correct in German, but it is for English). However, this feature can be used to force the sorting we want.

With \DeclareRobustCommand{\VAN}[3]{#2} in the preamble, we are saying that when LaTeX finds \VAN{Noort}{Van}{van} in the document, it should ignore the first and third argument, so printing "Van". This will come from what has been stored reading the aux file. However, before the bibliography we change the command so that it ignores the first and second argument, so printing "van", which is what's desired in the bibliography.

The first argument is never used by LaTeX, but it is by BibTeX; the string in the first argument can be anything that ensures correct sorting: It comes before the rest of the surname, so it will the most important information for sorting.

I should mention that I wouldn't change how a name appears in the two places.

Answer 2

Natbib offers the \Citet command for languages where you usually use the lower case version, but not at the beginnig of a sentence. This command will make the van, von, di etc. upper case. Nothing stops you from using \Citet every where. This can be combined with your \noopsort solution:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[authoryear]{natbib}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\newcommand{\noopsort}[2]{#2}

\begin{document}
\citet{vannoort}
\Citet{vannoort}
\Citet{other}

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{vannoort}
\end{document}

vannoort.bib:

@article{vannoort,
    author={\noopsort{Noort}{van Noort}, Thomas},
    title={An important paper},
    year=2010
}

@article{other,
    author={Other, Some},
    title={Not so important paper},
    year=2011
}

output:

Answer 3

I understand that disregarding the "von" component of an author's name for purposes of sorting is common practice in Dutch typography -- quite likely because roughly half the Dutch population have either "de" or "van" in their names. (OK, this may be a slight exaggeration...) The "Dutch" sorting style is, by the way, not unique to the Dutch; for instance, I know for a fact that it is also practiced, to some degree, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. E.g., a person named "Peter von Matt" living in Zurich would be listed in the phone book under "Matt, Peter von" rather than under "von Matt, Peter".

It's actually quite easy to modify most bibliography styles to implement the "Dutch" sorting style. Modifying the bibliography stye file spares you the task of hand-editing (possibly lots and lots of) author fields in your .bib file to override the default sorting method for the names in question. The following discussion assumes that you use the plainnat bibliography style; adjustments shouldn't be difficult to figure out for many other bibliography styles.

• Find the file plainnat.bst in your TeX distribution. Make a copy of this file and call the copy (say) plaindutch.bst. (Do not edit/modify an original file of your TeX distribution directly.)

• Open plaindutch.bst in your favorite text editor.

• Locate the function sort.format.names. In that function, locate the following line:

    s nameptr "{vv{ } }{ll{ }}{  ff{ }}{  jj{ }}" format.name$ 't :=
  

  Change this line to:

    s nameptr "{{ll{ }}{  ff{ }}{  jj{ }}" format.name$ 't :=
  

  Even if you're entirely unfamiliar with BibTeX's syntax, I trust you're able to tell what's going on: with the change in place, the sorting by authors' names will disregard any "von" part.

• Save the file plaindutch.bst either in the same directory as your main .tex file or in a directory that's searched by your TeX distribution. If you use the latter method, be sure to update the TeX distribution's filename database.

• Start using the new bibliography style by issuing the instruction \bibliographystyle{plaindutch} in your .tex files.

Happy BibTeXing!

Comment: This answer was originally posted to address the question Latex citations Bibtex. Wrong capital and alphabetical order. However, that question got closed as being a duplicate of this posting, so I've migrated my answer so that others may (hopefully) come across it.

Answer 4

Before you start hacking away or using LaTeX code to address this: perhaps bibtex can do this natively?

Bibtex can recognise 4 nameparts, but only if you feed it authornames in a format in which it can distinguish each part:

• Firstname
• Lastname
• "jr" (designations like jr, sr and such)
• "von" part (designations like von, van, van de, di, etc.)

See http://maverick.inria.fr/~Xavier.Decoret/resources/xdkbibtex/bibtex_summary.html#names for a lot more info.

Short version: use author = {von Last, jr, First} with no capital letter for the "von" part, starting Last and First with capitals. jr can be either capitals or not.

I'm not sure if this addresses your problem, but if it doesn't, then you indeed might want to patch \citet to handle capitalisation correctly.