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We have citeauthor at home

BibLaTeX has this great macro that prints the authors of a BibTeX entry. E.g. given a BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{Anantharaman2018,
  author       = {Prashant Anantharaman and
                  J. Peter Brady and
                  Patrick Flathers and
                  Vijay H. Kothari and
                  Michael C. Millian and
                  Jason Reeves and
                  Nathan Reitinger and
                  William G. Nisen and
                  Sean W. Smith},
  editor       = {Marco Carvalho and
                  Matt Bishop and
                  Anil Somayaji and
                  Wolter Pieters and
                  Mohammad Mannan},
  title        = {Going Dark: {A} Retrospective on the North American Blackout of 2038},
  year         = {2040},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the New Security Paradigms Workshop},
  pages        = {52--63},
  publisher    = {{ACM}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3285002.3285011}
}

The BibLaTeX command \citeauthor{Anantharaman2018} prints:

Anantharaman et al.

This is great!

• Fails when you typo a citekey¹.
• Never misspell a last name again.
• Maximum number of names to be included configurable both globally and locally².

I used this macro quite a bit when writing my thesis. Interested?

Sadly, using BibLaTeX is not always an option. For example, when submitting to a conference that has a custom BibTeX style file. natbib supports \citeauthor, but it’s unclear to me if it can work with BibTeX’s style files. What can one do? I guess there’s no choice but to start typing all author names manually… 😱

Faking \citeauthor with usebib

Not to worry, usebib to the rescue! Sort of. A source listing says more than a thousand words:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{usebib}

\begin{filecontents*}{testBibliography.bib}
@inproceedings{Armborst2024,
  author       = {Lukas Armborst and
                  Pieter Bos and
                  Lars B. van den Haak and 
                  Marieke Huisman and
                  Robert Rubbens and 
                  {\"{O}}mer Sakar and
                  Philip Tasche},
  shortauthor  = {Armborst et al.},
  title        = {The VerCors Verifier: {A} Progress Report},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-031-65630-9\_1},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\newbibfield{shortauthor}
\bibinput{testBibliography}
\newcommand{\myciteauthor}[1]{\usebibentry{#1}{shortauthor}}

\begin{document}

\myciteauthor{Armborst2024}

\end{document}

Pure perfection:

Effectively, usebib provides a convenient interface to extract values from the fields of entries of your bibliography without any further processing. This makes implementing an inferior clone of \citeauthor almost trivial.

\myciteauthor is as safe as \citeauthor: if you typo the citekey, or the shortauthor field is missing, you get an error. Otherwise, \myciteauthor outputs the value of the shortauthor. I like it!

Downsides

Okay, I admit, it’s not as good as \citeauthor.

All entries need to follow the format fieldname = {content}. Most importantly, this means quotes cannot be used to delimit the value. This is not really a problem, unless you want to start using this technique halfway through a project. I hope you know some regular expressions…

To enable \myciteauthor for a specific citekey, you do need to add a separate field to that entry to contain the shortened version of the author list. It’s therefore not as easy as BibLaTeX’s \citeauthor, nor as robust. At least you can copy over the author name in a controlled environment, right next to the original author name (which should be correct, assuming you get your bibtexes from dblp or someplace else), making eyeballing the shortauthor field easy. Plus, this effort is amortized over all the times you will \myciteauthor the entry!

It’s not as flexible: there’s no version of \myciteauthor to be used at the beginning of a sentence that capitalizes the “von” part of a last name. Also, if you want to switch to a different number of last names globally, you need to change that in all entries, manually. So, best not to want that.

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