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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label bibprefixsort</title>
</head><body>
<h3>BibTeX sorting and name prefixes</h3>
<p/>BibTeX recognises a bewildering array of name prefixes (mostly
those deriving from European language names); it ignores the prefixes
when sorting the bibliography &#8212; you want &#8220;Ludwig van Beethoven&#8221;
sorted under &#8220;Beethoven&#8221;, not under &#8220;van&#8221;.  (Lamport made a witty
deliberate mistake with Beethoven&#8217;s name, in the first edition of his
LaTeX manual.)
<p/>However, a recurring issue is the desire to quote Lord Rayleigh&#8217;s
publications (&#8220;Lord&#8221; isn&#8217;t an acceptable prefix), or names from
languages that weren&#8217;t considered when BibTeX was designed such as
&#8220;al-Wakil&#8221; (transcribed from the Arabic).  What&#8217;s needed is a
separate &#8220;sort key&#8221;, but BibTeX only allows such a thing in
citations of items that have no author or editor.
<p/>The solution is to embed the sort key in the author&#8217;s name, but to
prevent it from being typeset.  Patashnik recommends a command
<code>\</code><code>noopsort</code> (no-output-sortkey), which is defined and used as
follows:
<blockquote>
<pre>
@PREAMBLE{ {\providecommand{\noopsort}[1]{}} }
...
@ARTICLE{Rayleigh1,
AUTHOR = "{\noopsort{Rayleigh}}{Lord Rayleigh}",
...
}
</pre>

</blockquote><p>
Note that this <code>\</code><code>noopsort</code> applies to the last name in this kind of
construct, so an author with an Arabic name might be rendered:
<blockquote>
<pre>
...
AUTHOR = "Ali {\noopsort{Hadiidii}}{al-Hadiidii}",
...
</pre>
</blockquote><p>

A further use might deal with word order games, as in the famous
Vietnamese name:
<blockquote>
<pre>
...
AUTHOR = "\noopsort{Thanh Han The}{Han The Thanh}",
...
</pre>
</blockquote><p>

though that author seems well-acquainted with Western confusion about
the significance of the parts of his name (even to the extent of
missing out the accentuation, as above&#8230;).
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=bibprefixsort">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=bibprefixsort</a>
</body>