Dear List, I wish to use JabRef to manage bibliographical information about a collection of technical reports. The reports go back 40+ years, we have about 1600 in digital form and somewhat fewer yet to be scanned and digitized. It is mixed bag, and I have some problems to get all the information properly coded. The future maintenance of the bibliography needs to be done by several people on an incidental basis. I think the JabRef interface is close to ideal for this, but it would be helpful if I could customize BibTeX fields more than I know how to do. Please let me explain a few issues and ask for your advice about the nicest way to handle them in JabRef. My starting point is a non-BibTeX listing of the reports.
1. Many reports have an editor, but not an author. BibTeX demands that a techreport have an author, but I think that JabRef is more relaxed about this and I appreciate that. I believe that I can customize the interface appropriately by changing the required fields for techreports and make author/editor a required field, just as is the case for books. Any concerns over this? 2. About 200 reports are translations of Russian literature. Sometimes the translator is a named person and in other cases it is an organization. In any case, I would like to have a BibTeX field "translator", following in all its treatments closely the author and editor fields. Can I customize JabRef so that it recognizes this field and does something reasonable with it? 3. For dozens of reports the date poses problems; it is not on the report and in the bibliographical entry we want something like "Unknown, probably 1977". Should I just assign that value to the "year" field? Some BibTeX styles have, I believe, a "dateother" field; maybe I should use that? 4. Sometimes there is a valuable remark that I would really like to have attached to the bibliographical entry. Examples of such remarks: "See Report ABC-xxx for a translation into English"; "Report not available" (when we only have bibliographical information); "Title page is missing". Should I use the BibTeX "note" field or the "comment" field for this? What guides the choice? 5. The bibliography that I am starting from does not provide author affiliations, but in some cases there is a remark that is attached to the entire list of authors (or editors). It would be very nice to have a BibTeX field "authornote" that is recognized by JabRef. On output, in whatever style, if the authornote is non-empty then I would like to see it in brackets immediately following the author list, as in "A. Jones and B. Smith [<authornote>]". Can a customization handle this? If not, what else might be a good treatment? In the cases that I'm dealing with this authornote usually identifies a working group on behalf of which the authors prepared the report. 6. For techreports, Institution is a mandatory field, and it normally coincides with the publisher. The Institution has, usually, an address (a city and country anyway). Should I put the address in a separate field? I am quite inclined to make it part of the name of the Institution, just to ensure that it doesn't get separated or otherwise mangled. I hope for your good advice! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Beautiful is writing same markup. Internet Explorer 9 supports standards for HTML5, CSS3, SVG 1.1, ECMAScript5, and DOM L2 & L3. Spend less time writing and rewriting code and more time creating great experiences on the web. Be a part of the beta today http://p.sf.net/sfu/msIE9-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Jabref-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jabref-users
