Biblatex alphabetic style like [Smith, 2005]

Question

the alphabetic style of biblatex is already very close to my requirements, but considering the following entry

@BOOK{smith1,
  author = {John Smith and Mike Someone},
  title = {The book with a very very very very very long title},
  year = {2005},
  publisher = {Publisher},
  location = {New York}
}

I would like to have a label like [Smith, 2005] instead of [Smi+05]. In other words:

[<first author's last name>, <year with 4 digits>]

In case there is more than one entry with the same author and the same year, a single letter should be added right behind the year like in [Smith, 2005a] (alphabetic already does this by default).

Answer 1

With biblatex 2+ and biber 1+ you can customize alphabetic labels with \DeclareLabelalphaTemplate. Here's an example.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=alphabetic,maxalphanames=1]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\renewcommand*{\labelalphaothers}{}

\DeclareLabelalphaTemplate{
  \labelelement{
    \field[final]{shorthand}
    \field{labelname}
    \field{label}
  }
  \labelelement{
    \literal{,\addhighpenspace}
  }
  \labelelement{
    \field{year}
  }
}

\begin{document}
\cite{knuth:ct:a,knuth:ct:b,knuth:ct:c,baez/article,baez/online}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

A couple notes:

• The argument to \literal should be defined globally. Typically we specify one or more characters. We can also use biblatex's whitespace commands. Unlike biblatex's punctuation commands (e.g. \addcomma), they aren't restricted to citations and bibliographies.

• Similar results could be obtained with BibTeX by modifying an author-year style (e.g. Bibliography styles like authordate2 in biblatex or natbib?), but getting the right item label alignment in the bibliography isn't easy.