#544 Force journal (un)abbreviate when saving

[Anonymous]

Hi

Here at the institute at the University we use subversion to share a bibtex file with more than a 1000 entries. We have different background and writes articles to different journals. Suppose one author unabbreviates journal names and commits the changes to the svn repository. The next author checks out the bibtex file. He is writing an article to another journal and does not have the abbreviated journal name, meaning he cannot unabbreviate the journal names according to the requirement from the journal he is writing to. The bibtex file is now corrupt.

We would like an option specifying that jabref is to (un)abbreviate all journal names in a database when saving the database. This is something that has to follow the database file. Ie the bibfile will contain lines like:

@comment{jabref-meta: save-with-journal-abbreviation:}

or

@comment{jabref-meta: save-with-journal-unabbreviation:}

This way the bibtex file will not be corrupt.

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Suppose we have journal abbreviation files science.txt, nature.txt and prl.tex wich contains the unabbreviations used in the journals "Science", "Nature" and "Physical Review letters". Further we have the bibtex file articles.bib, wich has the option "@comment{jabref-meta: save-with-journal-abbreviation:}" set as well as the option:

@comment{jabref-meta: abbreviation-export-when-save:science.tex;prl.tex;}

specifying that after articles.bib have been saved with journal abbreviations, read-only files articles-science.bib and articles-prl.bib are generated. (The files are read-only because they are generated, and should not be edited.) The file articles-science.bib is the same as articles.bib except that articles-science.bib has been unabbreviated with the abbreviation from the science.txt file. The same goes for the articles-prl.bib file. Such a feature would be nice.

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We write documents in latex and use different style files (bst-files) to adapt the citation style to the demands of different journals.

This requires journal names to be stored in the bib-file as MACRO names which are translated later on (by bibtex) according to a specified style (bst) file.

It would be nice if one could optionally force abbreviation name to start and end with a "#". This way it becomes a macro for latex, and bibtex will report a warning, if this macro is not defined (in the bst file). This way you know that the abbrevation is not unabbrevated to some journal name in your document, and that you have an error to fix.

If you have any questions please send me an email.

Best
Søren R. Jørgensen
soren.jorgensen (at) umb (dot) no
Inst. of Mathematical Sciences and Technology (IMT)
Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB)