Author and affiliations in footnotes

Question

I have the following MWE that I use to add affiliations to authors:

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

\begin{document}
\title{\sc This is a title \thanks{Thanks to ...}}

\author{Dr. A\thanks{University A and University B} \and Dr. B\thanks{Univesity A} \and Dr. C\thanks{University C and University D}}

\maketitle
\end{document}

Aas you can see, Dr. A and Dr. B share the affiliation to University A:

Is there a way to make this more neat and tidy by having the universties have their own, individual footnote, i.e. one for University A, one for University B, ... So I can basically pick and choose which author has which affiliation and thereby avoid having a footnote that says University A and University B

Answer 1

In your particular example, without fiddling too much with the input and manually specifying the footnotemark will give you the desired result. I would say may be the code is not so elegant, but the result is as you wish:

\documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

\begin{document}
\title{\sc This is a title \thanks{Thanks to ...}}
  \author{First author \thanks{University A} \and Second author \footnotemark[2] \thanks{University B} \and Third author \thanks{University C}}

\maketitle
\end{document}

You simply add the number of the footnote that you want repeated for a certain author. The number here is [2] as you have a footnotemark for the title which takes number 1. The first author and the second author share footnotemark number [2]. The second author has an additional footnotemark [3] if you want to repeat it elsewhere and so on.