Customizing the BibTeX key generator

In the 'Key pattern' tab in Preferences, one can set the fields used in auto generation of BibTex labels. The pattern can be set for each of the standard entry types.

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 author
[authors]: The last name of all authors
[authIniN]: The beginning of each author's last name, using no more than N characters.
[authorIni]: The first 5 characters of the first author's last name, and the last name initials of the remaining authors.
[authN]: The first N characters of the first author's last name
[authN_M]: The first N characters of the Mth author's last name
[auth.auth.ea]: The last name of the first two authors, and ".ea" if there are more than two.
[edtr]: The last name of the first editor
[edtrIniN]: The beginning of each editor's last name, using no more than N characters
[editors]: The last name of all editors
[editorIni]: The first 5 characters of the first editor's last name, and the last name initials of the remaining editors.
[edtrN]: The first N characters of the first editor's last name
[edtrN_M]: The first N characters of the Mth editor's last name
[edtr.edtr.ea]: The last name of the first two editors, and ".ea" if there are more than two.
[firstpage]: The number of the first page of the publication
[lastpage]: The number of the last page of the publication
[shorttitle]: The first 3 words of the title
[shortyear]: The last 2 digits of the publication year
[veryshorttitle]: 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.

If you haven't defined a key pattern for a certain entry type, the Default key pattern will be used. You can change the default pattern - its setting is above the list of entry types in the Key pattern section of the Preferences dialog.

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