BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Brackets in BibTeX Database Entry Field

[mcswell]

I'm going to post a problem I had, with my solution, in case it's of use to someone, since I couldn't find any references to this anywhere. (Or in case someone has a better solution; conceivably this solution would cause problems for sorting an author's entries by date.)

I have a BiBTeX entry something like this:

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@Book{Bell2004,
  author = "H.C.P. Bell",
  title = "blaa...",
  publisher = "so-and-so",
  address = "somewhere",
  year = "2004 [1883]"
}

Running this through LaTeX (actually XeLaTeX, but I doubt that is the problem), I got the error msg:

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Package bibtopic Error: Can't parse brackets in key `Bell2004' properly

The problem is of course with the 'year' field. I solved it by putting the dates inside curly braces:

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year = "{2004 [1883]}"

[localghost]

[…] (Or in case someone has a better solution; conceivably this solution would cause problems for sorting an author's entries by date.) […]

It has become a common practice to group the field values by braces instead of quotation marks.

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\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{author2004,
  author = {Author Name},
  title = {Book Title},
  publisher = {Publisher},
  year = {2004 [1883]}
}
\end{filecontents*}
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\bibliographystyle{unsrt}

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

Presumably the issue with sorting by date would persist.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[mcswell]

It has become a common practice to group the field values by braces instead of quotation marks.

Interesting, our own bibref files are starting to look like that as we fixed things up that we didn't like (another instance where we had to do this was double quotes inside a title).

One bracing effect would be that (afaik) it prevents the formatting program(s) from tweaking capitalization. I'm not sure whether I would consider that a bug or a blessing; the amount of cleanup I have had to do (putting proper names in {}) is possibly balanced by the fact that I Tend To Over-Capitalize Titles.

Is there somewhere a list of tips/ common practices of this sort for LaTeX and BiBTeX? Things which are not documented in the ordinary literature. None of the forum titles jumped out at me as having this sort of lore.