BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Specify shorter author name for in-text citations?

[decitrig]

I'm using the natbib package to generate MLA citations & bibliography, but I've hit a snag. I have the following citation:

Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA. The WPA Guide to New York City. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, c1982.

which is the "corporate author" style. I would like to cite this as (WPA ##) in the text - is there a way to do that?

[edit]
Ok, let me clarify: I know I could just write (WPA ##) in the text, but then how do I make sure the relevant bibliography entry is included in the "References" section?
[/edit]

[olofos]

To fully answer your question I would need some more information: What BibTeX style are you using? What command are you using to cite the book? How does your current BibTeX entry look?

One solution might be to manually change .bbl file after running bibtex. The file should contain a line looking something like

Code: Select all

\bibitem[{Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA}(1982)]{wpa}

If you change this to

Code: Select all

\bibitem[WPA()]{wpa}

the book should be cited with "WPA" as the author name. Then run latex twice without running bibtex. Note that you would have to redo this change every time you change your citations and run bibtex.

A nicer solution could be to use the natbib alias mechanism. Look up the \defcitealias and \citepalias / \citetalias commands in the natbib manual

[decitrig]

Sorry to be so long replying. I wound up writing a custom command for doing an MLA citation that manually specified the author/page number, and included a nocite for the referenced text.

Found a good MLA .sty file here:
http://web.reed.edu/cis/help/LaTeX/bibtexstyles.html