Hi,
I'd like to raise you attention to the current status quo of working
with bibtex, biblatex, and the various bibtex styles. So far, jabref is
no help in overcoming the problems that everyday work with bib(la)tex
brings. Here's why:
Let's talk bibtex first:
1) An example: what does the address field mean? The address of the
publisher you say? Wrong! The official bibtex documentation states, that
one day, the bibtex developer thought it would be a good idea to change
the standard bibtex styles so that address is interpreted as the
location of the conference for @inproceedings and @proceedings entries
(which impacts the order in which the fields are emitted to the
references). However, many bibtex styles (like the one provided by
springer for llncs and journals, also also some of the ones that come
with texlive, the babelbib ones are an example, I believe) still
interpret the address field as the publisher's address. Also, some
people use the location field to store the location of the conference.
(Sidenote: I think, that it was an utterly bad idea that the meaning of
the address fields depends on the entry type).
2) There's a tradition in abusing year, month, and day to store the date
of the conference, instead of the date of publication. The field day is
even abused to store a range of days. And nobody's really sure how to
express the range September 28th to October 1st. So some people abuse
the month field and store values like this:
month = {22-24~}#oct
This will yield "22-24 October" and a serious abuse. It will be emitted
in the wrong place by most bibtex styles anyway.
3) BibTeX entries downloadable from acm and various other sources are
not proper bibtex, as far as I'm aware. @phdthesis entries don't contain
the school or similar. I have to edit these manually every time.
Finally, biblatex came along:
The set of available fields and their meaning has changed, there are
several types fields including dates and ranges of dates. Especially, it
offers field that eliminate the most common misuses, e.g. it
differentiates between date of publication and date of the conference.
It allows for storing the location the conference took place and the
address of the publisher etc.
Unfortunately, JabRef was no big help in working with BibTex. While it
displays a list of fields, it doesn't really help in finding out the
meaning of the fields. I had to research all of the above myself. And as
soon as I was aware of the various conventions, I found that JabRef has
no means of converting between them. What, if I use the address field
for the location of the conference and not the publishers address? But I
have to use the bibtex style file provided by Springer, which treats
address as the publishers address? How can I convert between convention
A and B or vice versa? Also, which convention does JabRef expect me to
follow?
Right now, JabRef does not need to know whether the address is the
publisher's or the conference's location, but as soon as you would want
to offer an export function to make it easier for me to work with bibtex
style that don't follow whatever convention I use in JabRef, then that
becomes important.
But let's face it: people claim that biblatex is the future and that
bibtex is obsolete (bibtex doesn't support utf8, for example), even if
publishers like Springer will certainly need a decade or two to provide
styles for biblatex. In addition, as explained above biblatex offers
fields requested by many people and even more importantly it provides a
_standard_ for keeping that information like date and location of a
conference in your bib files - which is a big advantage as it keeps your
bib-database clean!
I would suggest that JabRef should soon switch to follow the standard as
defined by the biblatex documentation. It should provide help about the
meaning of the individual fields (can be copy/pasted from the biblatex
documentation, I guess). It would also have to provide an export
function that converts the data into a formal suitable for a the various
bibtex style files out there. And it should probably provide an import
function for converting bib files for bibtex into biblatex compatible data.
JabRef 3.0 maybe?
Regards,
Sven
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