The pattern can contain any text you wish, in addition to field markers that indicate that a specific field of the entry should be inserted at that position of the key. A field marker generally consists of the field name enclosed in square braces, e.g. [volume]. If the field is undefined in an entry at the time of key generation, no text will be inserted by the field marker.
Several special field markers are offered, which extract only a specific part of a field. These are listed below. Feel free to suggest new special field markers.
Special field markers:
auth]: The last name of the first authorauthors]: The last name of all authorsauthorIni]: The first 5 characters of the first author's last name,
and the last name initials of the remaining authors.edtr]: The last name of the first editoreditors]: The last name of all editorseditorIni]: The first 5 characters of the first editor's last name,
and the last name initials of the remaining editors.firstpage]: The number of the first page of the publicationlastpage]: The number of the last page of the publicationshorttitle]: The first 3 words of the titleshortyear]: The last 2 digits of the publication yearveryshorttitle]: The first word of the title,
discounting 'the', 'a', 'an'.A field name (or one of the above pseudo-field names) may optionally be followed by a modifier. Currently the only defined modifier is :lower, which forces the text inserted by the field marker to be in lowercase. For example, [auth:lower] expands the last name of the first author in lowercase.
The default key pattern is [auth][year], and this could produce
keys like e.g. Yared1998 If the key is not unique in the
current database, it is made unique by adding one of the letters a-z
until a unique key is found. Thus, the labels might look like:
Yared1998
Yared1998a
Yared1998b