booktitle, and initials without full stops

[Nick Bart]

A few remarks on your example on http://sourceforge.net/p/bibutils/home/Working%20with%20MODS/:

@book(bandj,
author="T. L. Blundell
and L. N. Johnson",
BOOKTITLE="Protein Crystallography",
publisher="Academic Press",
address="New York",
year=1976)

First, biblatex @book may have a title, and also a maintitle (if it’s a single volume which is part of a multi-volume book), but is not supposed to have a booktitle itself.

booktitle appears only in inbook, incollection, inproceedings.

Your example actually does not yield a title in the output when formatted with either biblatex or bibtex. So while a nice and error-tolerant converter might want to check whether in the absence of a title, a booktitle is present and use this as title instead, it is not strictly necessary: bibtex and biblatex don’t do this either.

Second, bib2xml produces

<titleInfo>
    <title>Protein Crystallography</title>
</titleInfo>

whereas biblatex2xml yields

<titleInfo>
    <title/>
</titleInfo>

(So, bib2xml tries to be nice, and biblatex2xml doesn’t?!)

Third, I noticed that with this entry, but also with other biblatex data, initials appear without a full stop, e.g.:

<namePart type="given">T</namePart>
<namePart type="given">L</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Blundell</namePart>

pandoc output does show full stops after initials whether they are present in the MODS file or not, so at least pandoc users are not really affected. Still I wonder whether it might cause problems in other places.

[Chris Putnam]

The lack of full stops after the initials is intentional. And it's handled properly by all of my converters (full stops are written in all output formats). I'm going to retain the current behavior until it's reported to cause a problem for someone or some program.

[Chris Putnam]

Your analysis is pretty comprehensive for a stupid mistake I made in writing the bibtex reference many a year ago. I've fixed the document to use "title".

In the current converters, bib2xml uses "booktitle" in @book references as an alias for "title". It's not strictly correct, but it does fix some number of errors in "non-compliant" bibtex files I've accumulated from users over the years. biblatex2xml doesn't do this and fits the standard more closely. I originally wrote the converters only to handle approved biblatex fields (with some errors and some issues of things that I didn't bother dealing with yet).

biblatex2xml outputs an empty title since there isn't a valid title here, but MODS demands (or at least used to, I haven't read the DTD's for the latest version) that the titleInfo be present.

If you like, I can easily make "booktitle" an alias in biblatex parsing of @book references, but I'd rather do it for valid occasions of biblatex misuse rather than just a thinko on my part.

[Nick Bart]

Thank you. And, no, I don’t think such an alias is needed.

[Nick Bart]

Actually, <titleInfo> does not seem to be strictly required. Entries without it do validate against http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-4.xsd.

The minimum requirement for a valid <mods> element apparently is to contain at least one (!) child element of abstract, accessCondition, classification, extension, genre, identifier, language, location, name, or note.

That being said, of course it usually does not make any sense at all to have a bibliography item without a title, and in fact biblatex requires titles for all entry types (except for the special cases of set and xdata).

Also, the DLF/Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for Shareable MODS Records require at least one <titleInfo><title>.

So it might make sense for bibutils, at least when converting from and to bib(la)tex, to issue a warning in case it cannot find a title. Presently, as far as I have seen, it doesn’t.