Re: [NTG-context] BibTeX inproceedings entries not rendered correctly in APA style

On 2021-05-25, Alan Braslau wrote:

On Mon, 24 May 2021 23:10:34 -0400 Rik Kabel wrote:

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On 5/24/2021 22:12, Alan Braslau wrote:

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On Mon, 24 May 2021 17:53:49 -0400 Rik Kabel wrote:

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This is intended. Or rather, it is a side-effect of the intended behavior.

If you add an editor ("editor={Baz, Bar}") you will get something like:

Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In B. Baz (Ed.), /Booktitle/. Author.

And if you then add a publisher ("publisher={Paymefirst}") you will get:

Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In B. Bar (Ed.), Booktitle. Paymefirst.

The APA presumes that you have both an editor and a publisher for pieces contained in other works. It calls for the use of the author as publisher if no publisher is present. It is silent about what to do if you have no editor. It looks like a missing editor field should be caught. What should the rule be?

Actually, @inproceedings should not be used without an editor - makes no sense. If the author of the paper happens to be the editor, then the .bib data file should define this with an editor= field.

We can change the behavior if a clear case can be made as to what fallback would make sense. Keep in mind the dictum: "garbage in/garbage out"...

Alan

For the case of works within works (inproceedings, inbook, incollection, perhaps conference) I would think that the simplest solution is to simply drop it, so that in the example above one would simply get:

Foo, B. (1983). Title of the paper. In /Booktitle/. Paymefirst.

Although I do think that, at least for inproceedings, lack of an editor should at least be flagged. A simple compilation of works may have no named editor, of I see no reason to require it for inbook or incollection. Cheap publishers regularly put out such collections of out-of-copyright works.

The implicit assumption that a work with no documented publisher is a self-published work is not especially to my liking -- publishers may have good reason to not identify themselves (think of the publishers of the works of Spinoza and, in part, Voltaire) -- but I understand that the APA thinks it important. Of course, if you cannot document the publisher for an entry, you can explicitly list it as unknown or /sine nomine/, as appropriate, to avoid the infelicity of having the author's name just stuck in there.

I sent a simple fix to Hans that handles the missing editor, silently. Someone who would want "Anonymous" or "unknown", or anything else can always put editor="Anonymous", etc. in their .bib database.

Thank you all for the precious comments. The current LMTX appears to have almost fixed my issue, except that inproceedings entries without a publisher have the text "Author" instead of the publisher's name. I must say that I have no requirement to use the APA style specifically; I do it only because it uses the format (Name, Year) for the citation. I guess that I could use another style (aps seems fine) and just customize the citation format. I have tried with \usebtxdataset[main.bib] \setupbtx[default:cite][alternative=authoryear] \usebtxdefinitions[aps] but it seems that the setup command has no effect: the citations still use numbers. Nicola