past, current and future default pattern for BibTeX keys?

mmmh

Hi,

let's assume I have
Doe, John; Mustermann, Martin: "An article about something". 2008

The last time I exported to BibTeX from Zotero was on 2011-03-18. Back then, I would have gotten the BibTeX key doe_2008_article. I do not remember which Zotero version that was, but I usually update within a few days a new version comes out.

Now (2011-05-13), I exported again and got doe_article_2008 from Zotero 2.1.6.

Why was the default key pattern changed? Will it be changed again in the future? I really do not like the idea of having to go through TeX documents, manually changing the referenced keys.

Have a nice weekend.

mmmh

ajlyon

The key algorithm changes only very rarely, and I can say, as the person primarily responsible for translator updates, that I will keep in mind key stability in coming BibTeX exporter updates. There was a small change in key generation in late March 2011-- I will try to not allow further changes that will break existing keys. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

mmmh

Thanks for the quick reply. So I can now change my references accordingly and know they are future-proof.

ajlyon

They should be stable-- there is likely to be increased key generation flexibility in the relatively near future, but the default pattern will remain the same as at present.

mmmh

Thanks. I decided to return to the old format because it is used by others in my working group.

Changing the format actually was simpler I though, I just had to change line 58 in BibTeX.js to
var citeKeyFormat = "%a_%y_%t";