Re: BibTeX inproceedings entries not rendered correctly in APA style

[Alan Braslau <braslau.list@comcast.net>]

On Fri, 28 May 2021 19:52:19 -0000 (UTC)
Nicola <nvitacolonna@gmail.com> wrote:

> > If there is no publisher, then @unpublished is a better category.
> > APA explicitly, and for good reason, accounts for self-publishing,
> > indicating that the Author was the publisher.  
> 
> Ah ok, that explains the output I was obtaining. So, I am using the
> wrong bibliographic style for my purposes. In practice, at least in
> Computer Science, publishers (and also editors) are often omitted in
> references (it's more a "don't care", rather than a "don't know"
> thing, though).
> 
> > If a publisher does not exist, was it published?
> >
> > If the publisher is unknown, then why not state that:
> > publisher="unknown publisher", or whatever?  
> 
> Strictly speaking, your reasoning makes perfect sense, and I am all
> for enforcing constraints if a given bibliographic style requires
> them. But then, there might be alternatives for when one does not
> need to adhere to those styles. Does ConTeXt (LMTX) currently provide
> anything else besides apa and aps?
> 
> I have read the BibTeX manual looong time ago, but I remember that
> there were mandatory and optional fields for each reference type. My
> memory may fail me, but I think that Editor and Publisher were not
> mandatory fields for inproceedings and article (I think Publisher is
> mandatory for book). Is there a bibliographic style in ConTeXt that
> follows those rules?
> 
> Bibliography management is very sophisticated in ConTeXt (much more
> than LaTeX) and I have not grasped all of its details yet. It seems
> to me that it has also evolved quite a bit in recent years. So, the
> "ConTeXt way" of doing bibliographies still eludes me to some extent.

In writing the ConTeXt bibliography system, we tried to base this on
references, indeed following the original bibtex manual for its
definitions. The APA style follows the APA style guide as best as
possible.

The APS style is intended as a simple example of a numbered
bibliography minimalist style.

Multiple other styles exist out there, more or less well defined. The
problem is that most of them are not very rigorous, and they are
greatly abused. Many publishers follow their own (quirky) bibliography
styles.

The Context system started out as sort of a database handling
subsystem, useful in publishing. It is entirely tune-able, through
setups and parameters. However, the system is complex, so the
customization is not quite as easy as originally intended. Note that
the original bibtex system was conceived in order to have this
configurability, however few were those who mastered writing
bibliography styles, and even carefully crafted styles, for example as
implemented by the APS RevTeX, were buggy and had a number of known,
serious limitations requiring manual intervention.

We could, and have had the intention of, writing other bibliography
styles. But there must be a motivation as well as a clearly defined
specification, for otherwise we will be heading down a rabbit hole of
differing expectations and endless tweaking.

As to "don't care" concerning publishers, this is not very academic.
Indeed, many famous books have been published by various publishers, in
particular for different markets. It is important to say, for each one
might be slightly different, have different pagination for example, and
even certain edits of the text. One might also not pay attention to the
edition, but this too can lead to major differences (even, and
especially in computer science).


Thomas Schmitz, one of the originators of the bibliography project,
will tell you to take the APA style as a model, and then modify it as
you wish to your own needs. I further took this to heart, trying to
write the macros as somewhat standard definitions that one could modify
as needed without breaking the entire system.

And then there are clearly bugs that can be fixed. In the case of a
missing publisher, it is not simply left blank because the APA style
explicitly tells us to put "Author" when there is no defined publisher,
so this is a feature, not a bug.

Alan
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