LaTeX forum ⇒ General ⇒ Abbreviations in Journal Titles in Bibliography with BibTeX

[Ian222]

I would like for some of my journal entries to be abbreviated in the bibliography. That is, I would like the journal entry in my .bib file that is input as:
journal = {Physical Review E},
to read: Phys. Rev. E in the bibliography of selected papers.

I only want this for selected publications; I still want to create bibliographies that show the entire journal title, and I don't want to modify my database for each paper. I tried using:
@String{"Physical Review E"="Phys. Rev. E"}
but it doesn't allow me to leave spaces in the entry on the left. I have a decent database of entries that work fine for everything but papers that require abbreviations of journal titles in the bibliography, and I can't find a solution. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Juanjo]

I don't know how to do that without changing the database. But, once modified as I explain below, you can easily pass from long to short titles and vice versa. Suppose you have a database like this:

@article{Bond2007,
   author =  {Bond, James},
   title =   {New results about a given topic},
   journal = {Physical Review E},
   year =    2007,
}
@article{Bond2006,
   author =  {Bond, James},
   title =   {A mathematical approach to a given topic},
   journal = {Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics},
   year =    2006,
}

Make a copy and call it, say, mydatabase.bib. Replace journal titles by a string:

@article{Bond2007,
   author =  {Bond, James},
   title =   {New results about a given topic},
   journal = PhysRevE,
   year =    2007,
}
@article{Bond2006,
   author =  {Bond, James},
   title =   {A mathematical approach to a given topic},
   journal = JCAM,
   year =    2006,
}

Write two additional bib files: shorttitles.bib, which contains

@string{PhysRevE="Phys. Rev. E"}
@string{JCAM="J. Comput. Appl. Math."}

and longtitles.bib with the lines:

@string{PhysRevE="Physical Review E"}
@string{JCAM="Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics"}

If the bibliography of a paper requires short journal titles, write in your tex file:

\bibliography{shorttitles,mydatabase}

However, if long titles are needed, write:

\bibliography{longtitles,mydatabase}

That's all. You haven't to change your database anymore. Simply switch between shorttitles and longtitles in the \bibliography command.

[Ian222]

Yes, you're right, and I expect this is what I will have to do.

But, I was hoping to be able to set this up for everyone in my group to have a database of references that are used regularly and keep them from having to use a specific abbreviation for a given file. In your example, if someone makes an additional entry into the database in six months with a JCAM paper and uses a different abbreviation, the system won't work as well. They'll have to put a new entry into the @string .bib file, which they may not know how to use. Not a big deal for JCAM, but I've seen a couple of different abbreviations for some other journals.

Thanks, I think I will try this out to see if I can make it work.

[jeffworne]

Hello,

I realize this is an OLD topic, but I'd thought I'd share my solution... I use JabRef to manage my papers. Within it, you can set up a list of journal abbreviations (there's a default one you can download, and you can add your own as well). All you'd need to do is make a master list of abbreviations and share that with all your users of your database. You can then easily toggle between short- and long-name journal titles.