Definition of unique bibtex keys

[koppor]

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To get rid of the hazzle with different keys being inconsistent across different systems, the system should enforce globally unique bibtex keys.

First idea: [authorIni][year]-[title:abbr:] (See Key patterns help). TODO: the title should get more readable.

Alternatives

• nbibtex shows a different approach, wich generates a new .bib file based on citations.
• Define an alias field in each BibTeX entry: Possible with biblatex's ids field. See http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/37646/9075

[tobiasdiez]

I think to get a truly unique identifier one would need GUIDs or something similar. If the key is just a simple combination of author, year and abbreviated title, then the chance to get duplicate keys is pretty high. As a compromise, one could store the entry in the database with the GUID as the key, but show a more user-friendly key to the user.