My recent bibtex posts have drawn a few comments, which I am very grateful for. I have already described one of these comments in a post I uploaded yesterday, where somebody had suggested that I look at biber and biblatex.
Another comment I received was made in the post about Parsing Bibtex Authors. I received the following comment:
… snip
Incidentally, why do you have
“T. van Woensel” instead of “van Woensel, Tom” in your bibtex entry?
If you want to the first names abbreviated then use the appropriate bibtex style.
I tried the format suggested above in my own bibtex file and I am pleased to say that the bibtex parser supplied by Andreas Classen does parse things as you would expect. That is.
“van Woensel, T.” displays correctly as ““, rather than “Woensel, T va” if you type the name in as “T. van Woensel”
This is good (and apologies to Andreas if I ever gave the impression that his parser was somehow flawed).
However, this is all well and good but ONLY if everybody types the names in the correct format given the structure of the names. In my experience, this is not the case, and so the parser has to somehow cope with when people do not follow the standard way of doing things.
As an example, I have just looked at a bibtex file that I downloaded from a leading journal’s web site and one of the author’s names is “Joyce van Loon” which would not parse correctly.
In case you want to read more, in a previous blog I pointed towards Norman Walsh’s web page as a good explanation of bibtex author formats. A recent forum entry I looked at pointed towards a slightly different Norman Walsh page.