BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ babelbib | Style "babalpha" inconsistent in Name Order

[Fibonacci]

So, say I'm citing a book by two authors, using the following BiBTeX file:

Code: Select all

@book{Does,
  author = "Doe, John and Doe, Jane",
  title = "Boring book title",
  publisher = "Random House"
}

I'm using babelbib for that:

Code: Select all

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}  %Any language will do
\usepackage[fixlanguage]{babelbib}
\begin{document}
\cite{Does}
\bibliography{aforementioned_file}
\bibliographystyle{babalpha}
\end{document}

The reference I get on the final document looks like this:

[DD] Doe, John and Jane Doe: Boring book title. Random House.

As you will notice, the authors are cited as "Lastname, Firstname" first and "Firstname Lastname" second, which is inconsistent.

Is there any way to make it consistent?

[localghost]

It works if you group the names with additional curly braces.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,english]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[fixlanguage]{babelbib}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{Does,
  author = {{Doe, John} and {Doe, Jane}},
  title = {Boring book title},
  publisher = {Random House}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\bibliographystyle{babalpha}

\begin{document}
  \nocite{*}
  \bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}

Remarks:

• It has become very common to use curly braces instead of quotation marks for data in a BibTeX entry.

Thorsten

[Fibonacci]

It works if you group the names with additional curly braces.

That, unfortunately, makes BiBTeX treat each name as a single indivisible unit, so if I later decide to switch to (say) \bibliographystyle{plain}, which (consistently) uses "Firstname Lastname", they will still appear as "Lastname, Firstname" unless I manually change each one of them on my BiBTeX file.

Is there no way to make babalpha consistent in the way it handles names?

[ruohomaa]

We ran into the same problem recently.

The solution seems to be to use as bibliography style babalpha-lf (last-first) or babalpha-fl (first-last).

[Fibonacci]

Thank you, that is exactly what I was looking for.