Group author abbreviations

[pat-githubber]

Hello,

I would like to group author abbreviation according to the The examples in the APA style guide:

I checked the Package documentation and the biblatex-apa-test.tex but I cannot identify, how the group author abbreviation is generated. According to the given example, I assume that The American Psychological Association and APA are defined in the bib file.

So, How do I achieve group author abbreviation in practice? Where and how is the full author (e.g. The American Psychological Association) and its abbreviation (APA) defined?

Thank you for this regard package!!

[moewew]

The long author names goes into the author field, the abbreviated form into shortauthor.

\documentclass[american]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=apa]{biblatex}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{8.21a,
  author      = {{The American Psychological Association}},
  shortauthor = {APA},
  title       = {Title1},
  date        = {2017},
}
@book{8.21b,
  author      = {{The American Psychological Association}},
  shortauthor = {APA},
  title       = {Title2},
  date        = {2006},
}

\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{8.21a}

ipsum \autocite{8.21b}

dolor \autocite{8.21a}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

You can find many examples from the APA manual in https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/blob/master/bibtex/bib/biblatex-apa-test-references.bib and the examples from the biblatex-apa docs in https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/blob/master/bibtex/bib/biblatex-apa-test-citations.bib (note that groupauthor is an obsolete field that has been superseded by author: https://github.com/plk/biblatex-apa/pull/157).

[pat-githubber]

I haven't checked the sub-directory master/bibtex/bib/ here at GitHub 🤦‍♂️ many thanks!!

After a quick research and try out, I discovered that neither Mendeley nor Zotero offers a shortauthor field.

• Mendeley web research: no results
• Mendeley on MacOS: Preferences -> Document Details -> Show fields: here, the field shortauthor is not listed
• Zotero Forum: shortauthor not available, see Looking for short author field

How do you use/implement shortauthor in practice? I assume it is done manually?

I probably will use the available field shorttitle in Mendeley, and manually search&replace shorttitle with shortauthor in the final bib file after my paper is done. I know that this could be done automatically with a latex code, which runs every time I compile, but I am not that advanced to realize this, yet.

[moewew]

shortauthor is a field in the standard biblatex data model. So software claiming to support biblatex could be expected to support this field.

I curate my .bib files manually, so I don't know a lot about tools like Mendeley and Zotero. From what I have seen so far it can be a bit tricky to get Mendeley to produce high-quality .bib files. I'd expect that there is some way to get Zotero to support shortauthor, if push comes to shove via Zotero Better BibTeX (https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/).