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I'm using BibTex with the style called "alpha." I am generally happy with the way it creates short labels, and have no desire to edit the style file or use a different style or anything like that.

There are one or two instances though where I would like to manually override the way it shortens names, but there are no obvious ways to do so. Are there any ways to modify the .bib file that affects the way alpha determines its labels? Add an extra entry, or put brackets around the names, or put the authors in two seperate fields, or something? Something that affects just one bibliographic entry, not all of the entries.

For context, if it helps, my specific situation is that I have a lot of citations from the same authors ([ABC19] and [ABC17] etc by Arnold, Bob and Charles), and there is one paper by authors with all the same initials ([ABC18] but now it's Alvin, Brian and Cyril), so the short label is misleading. The best solution would be to change the label slightly ([AlBrCy18]) so it's immediately obvious this is different people.

Logan Stokols
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  • Welcome to TeX.Se. – CampanIgnis Oct 06 '19 at 23:24
  • Imho, your use case is not a problem. You encounter the same problem with one publication by John Doe and another one by James Doe (if I am not mistaken). Many people who knows what an acronym is are aware of that (I guess). AlBrCy18 is inconsistent. Anyway, maybe you want to have a look on https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/73463/. It might by suitable for alpha, too. – CampanIgnis Oct 06 '19 at 23:32

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