Academic references to Icelandic authors
Thu, 25 Apr 2024
Academia, LaTeX
========================================

Academic references and citations are notoriously finicky to
handle. This is exactly why systems like biblatex exist to
automate the process. For the uninitiated, biblatex allows you
to define a reference in a file like so:

	@book{key,
		author = {},
		title = {},
		date = {},
		publisher = {}
	}

This is a rather limited example, but there are more fields
available. Now, by simply writing \cite{key} in your latex
document, you get a nice inline citation according to your
chosen style -- for instance (author's last name year) -- and a
bibliography entry containing all the relevant information at
the end of your document.

I recently ran into a problem with this system however exactly
because the author is cited by their last name, and Icelandic
people do not have last names in the same way as most people do.

On Iceland, it is typical for people to receive as their ``last
name'' the name of the parent matching their gender, plus the
suffix `son' or `dóttir' or a variation on these two (it get's
more complicated, but this will do for now). Think of Lord of
the Rings, where Thorin (oakenshield)'s full name is Thorin, son
of Thror, son of Thrain. On Iceland he would be called Thorin
Throrson, and his father would be Thror Thrainson.

To refer to these people by their last name is a little strange.
``The king under the mountain is Thror's son''. Therefore, it is
somewhat common to cite Icelandic people by their first name(s)
instead.

Getting a citation like this in biblatex turned out to be a
little tricky, especially when you don't want to write a custom
citation function. This post will detail what I did, for others
to copy.

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Firstly, In your .bib file you do the following:

	@book{key,
		author = {{Thorin Throrson}}, % Mind the double braces
		shorthand = {Thorin},
		keywords = {icelandic}
	}

The braces in the author field tell biblatex to cite the name in
full, rather than separating the first and last parts. The
shorthand tells it to use only `Thorin' for inline citations.
The keyword will be useful for separating out Icelandic names
from other abbreviations.

Usually, the shorthand field is often used when citing several
texts by the same author, especially if both texts are cited
frequently. In a paper about Kant, it is not particularly
helpful to constantly see (Kant 1781) and (Kant 1790). If on the
other hand, we use the abbreviated titles (KdRV) and (KdU), the
reader ends up much better informed. These abbreviations are then
listed at the end of the document using 

	\printbiblist{shorthand}

If this list is used then -- with the current setup -- this
would also include all of our Icelandic first names, which we
defined as abbreviations. This is where the defined keyword
comes in, which allows us to exclude these `abbreviations'

	\printbiblist[
		notkeyword=icelandic
	]{shorthand}

There may be better ways of doing this in Latex. In fact, I can
think of several ways to automate this process, but this is the
most simple and portable way I found of doing things, and it
importantly works with many versions of (bib)latex.