Biblatex translator - citeKeyformat

stratopoulos

I would like to start by saying thanks to Anjo and Adam for their work on the biblatex translator.

Q: I find the current cite key a bit cumbersome. My preference is for a simple author year without underscores. So in my translator I have made the following change:

var citeKeyFormat = "%a%y";

This works fine for now. However, I know that sooner or later I will have a case that the same first author has more than one papers in the same year, which will lead to duplicate cite keys. Is there any way that in such cases, the letter a, b, c, etc., is added at the end of the citekey?

Thanks,

TS

adamsmith

the problem with that - and one of the reasons it's not implemented - is that it would be very hard - likely impossible - to keep those citekeys stable, which is a major concern.

It would also not be entirely trivial to implement given the way translators work (i.e. by default going through items one-by-one, without looking at previously exported items), so it's not the type of thing we can quickly put in for people who don't mind potentially changing citekeys.

That said, you can have a look at the betterbibtex plugin, which allows for custom citekeys in the extra field:
https://github.com/friflaj/zotero-better-bibtex

emilianoeheyns

And for the generation using patterns; what stratopoulos wants is how BBT indeed does things, including the postfix character.