In bibliographies, how to present each work by an author after the first as a subindented paragraph with hanging indentation?

Question

I'm trying to achieve, in a BibTeX- or BibLaTeX-produced bibliography, a style used in scholarly books in conjunction with author-date citations that is exemplified by the following: The first entry of a work for a given author is a paragraph beginning flush left with hanging indentation of its second and later lines. Each entry of another work by the same author (here an 'additional entry') begins slightly indented from the left with hanging indentation of its second and later lines aligned with the second and later lines of the first work's entry. Placement of year of publication immediately after author name avails the reader in finding works cited in the form '[Author last name] [year]'. (This style can be achieved in a custom list with positive \leftmargin, negative \itemindent, and negative \listparindent in which an additional entry is created as a paragraph within the item giving the first entry.)

I am at a loss concerning how to realize this style by revising a BibTex .bst file, and would appreciate help on how to do it.

So too my predicament for BibLaTeX, although some glimpses of possibility appear. The package's author-year, verbose, and other styles use hanging indentations. A \bibhang length is specifiable by a \setlength command for hanging indentation of an entry. But how to subindent an additional entry and specify hanging indentation for it, and begin it with the year, eludes me, because the standard form of an additional entry begins with a dash flush left. A \bibnamedash command is said to allow one to specify what type of dash. I have read that this command is more complicated than it appears, but might one specify a space (e.g., \hspace{n} or \quad) by this command, and thereby achieve the equivalent of indentation? No doubt experts discern better avenues than these glimpses. I would be grateful to learn of them.

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Thanks very much to @moewe for this solution. I'm puzzled as to how the \setlength{\bibhang}{2\bibhang} command succeeds as it does, since it seems to define a length as a multiple of itself. I'd also be grateful to know about ext-authoryear or some part of it, which (with \DeclareField . . ., so I gather) perfectly places the year. I appreciate your alert (and that of @David Purton) about trying in BibLaTeX to capture multiple component works of a one-author collection within one entry. There are many occasions when that organization is needed (e.g., a writer would avoid the otiose appearance of listing separately ten works of Aristotle published in a definitive collected works volume). It seems that one could put titles of two works into the title field by writing, e.g., {Speaking of Objects'' and ``Natural Kinds} in which internal quotes are supplied knowing that enclosing quotes for the string are automatic. One could insert in the pages field two page number intervals, as in {1-25, 114-138} for works in order of their listing. (Showing the page intervals in the entry avails concision: e.g., 'Quine 1969, p. 120' without more unambiguously identifies a work within the collection.) Would the foregoing cause trouble in various ways that I don't glimpse? I respect your point that difficulty looms. It's also impressive from BibLaTeX's manual to see the attentiveness shown, in composing the package, to multitudinous scholarly conventions. Hence I'm hopeful that a route lies to this one.

Answer 1

The sub-indent issue can be solved pretty much as you say. biblatex knows the length \bibhang to control the hanging indent of subsequent lines in the bibliography item. You can then set \bibnamedash to insert a space half the size of \bibhang instead of the author name at the beginning of each subsequent entry with the same author.

In the MWE I doubled the usual size of \bibhang to show the effect more clearly, I also used my ext-authoryear style to get rid of the round brackets around the year more easily.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{ebgaramond}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=ext-authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\DeclareFieldFormat{biblabeldate}{#1}

\setlength{\bibhang}{2\bibhang}

\renewcommand*{\bibnamedash}{%
  \hspace{.5\bibhang}}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,knuth:ct:a,knuth:ct:b}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

In response to the questions in your edit.

• \setlength{\bibhang}{2\bibhang} works (perhaps surprisingly for anyone who ever tried the - at first glance - syntactically similar \renewcommand{\foo}{2\foo}) because the new value is evaluated before it is assigned. It is similar to the variable assignment in imperative languages like C, where x = x+1, x += 1 or x++ assign to x the value that results from adding one to the old value of x.
• biblatex-ext's ext-authoryear was only used to get rid of the parentheses around the year in the bibliography with \DeclareFieldFormat{biblabeldate}{#1}. It is not integral to the whole sub-indent thing which is purely handled by redefining the standard macro \bibnamedelim. If you wanted to go with style=authoryear you would have to do slightly more to get rid of the parentheses: How to (properly) remove the parentheses around the year in authoryear style? (v3). You can find out more about the features of the style in the bundle documentation.

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The screenshot shows another very interesting aspect of your intended style: Several works by the same author from the same containing work are listed in the same entry (for example two @incollection chapters of the same @collection). This is not something that biblatex lets you do easily.

Each .bib entry normally refers to one specific work and thus has only one title. And each .bib entry is normally one separate item in the bibliography. While it is possible with crossref and related to model a parent-child relationship as in @collection $X$ contains paper @incollection $X_1$, it is a different task altogether to group several different entries with different data into one entry and show the data together and not one after another.