Re: BibTeX inproceedings entries not rendered correctly in APA style

[Rik Kabel <ConTeXt@rik.users.panix.com>]

On 5/28/2021 16:33, Alan Braslau wrote:
> 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 If there is no publisher, then @unpublished is a better category.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

The APA does not attempt to define bibliographies. It defines reference 
lists (and more specifically, reference lists for APA journal articles), 
and there is a difference. The reference list, as defined in the APA 
guide, simply exists to point the reader to the cited document (whatever 
'document' might mean). Bibliographies, as the APA guide acknowledges, 
can be much richer, although they do not say it that way.

Looking at the 6th edition of the APA guide (I have not reviewed the 7th 
edition guide, but as far as I know ConTeXt used the 6th edition), I 
note that example 36, a symposium contribution, does not have a 
publisher name. However, it does appear that ConTeXt would require a 
publisher for this and the following examples which have a DOI but no 
publisher. This may be an error, but whether on the part of the APA or 
ConTeXt or both I cannot say.

For books, the APA guide does not require a publisher if a URL is 
provided, and ConTeXt handles this properly. As with the use of DOIs for 
journal articles, this is consistent with the concept of a reference 
list, in which entries give only the information necessary to locate the 
document cited by the writer (with the usual caveats about the 
volatility and durability of electronic media and URLs).

With either reference lists or bibliographies I can imagine 
circumstances where it might be desirable to suppress one or more of the 
publisher, the date, the author, and the title. Consider a reference 
list of works by one author -- there is no need to state the author name 
in each entry. Similarly a list of works published in a given year, or 
by a specific publisher, or editions of one title. I do not mean to 
suggest that ConTeXt should support these, but simply suggest that even 
so-called 'required' fields may not always be required if they are implicit.

-- 
Rik

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