We have citeauthor at home
Bob Rubbens


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 citekey[1].
-   Never misspell a last name again.
-   Maximum number of names to be included configurable both globally
    and locally[2].

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.

[]

[1] Be aware of typosquatting citekeys though! This is especially likely
to happen if you, like me, use the enlightened citekey naming scheme of
AuthorYear, where duplicates are resolved by just appending “a”, “b”,
etc.

[2] Controlling it locally can be achieved by briefly overriding
maxcitenames with the desired number of authors. A bit hacky, but it
works!