bibutils 5.11: eprintclass and primaryClass ignored for @Article

[Chris Karakas]

Take the following test.bib file:

@Article{arxiv:1412.8142v1,
author={Manev, Hristo},
title={Almost contact B-metric structures and the Bianchi classification of the\n three-dimensional Lie algebras},
journal={arXiv},
year={2014},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
eprint={1412.8142v1},
eprintclass={math.DG},
url={http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8142v1}
}

and pass it to bib2xml:

bib2xml test.bib

It produces an XML file that does not contain the 'math.DG' string, i.e. lacks information about 'eprintclass'. That's a bug IMO.

Now, one might say that eprintclass is not supported for Article (but I think it is supported for theses?) and one should rather use 'primaryClass'. I have no problem with that, if it is so - just tell me.

But even with 'primaryClass', information is lost. Take for example this test.bib:

@Article{arxiv:1412.8142v1,
author={Manev, Hristo},
title={Almost contact B-metric structures and the Bianchi classification of the\n three-dimensional Lie algebras},
journal={arXiv},
year={2014},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
eprint={1412.8142v1},
primaryClass={math.DG},
url={http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8142v1}
}

which is identical to the above, up to the '...class' line. Now

bib2xml test.bib

does produce an XML file that contains class/subject information, namely in its subject element:

<subject>
    <topic>math.DG</topic>
</subject>

However, passing this XML file to xml2bib produces

@Article{arxiv:1412.8142v1,
author="Manev, Hristo",
title="Almost contact B-metric structures and the Bianchi classification of the{\n} three-dimensional Lie algebras",
journal="arXiv",
year="2014",
keywords="math.DG",
archivePrefix="arXiv",
eprint="1412.8142v1",
url="http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.8142v1"
}

i.e. a .bib file that is missing a 'primaryClass' line - class/subject information is lost! That's also a bug IMO.

O.K., we have a 'keywords' line now, which is new. But IMO

bib2xml ... | xml2bib

should not replace 'primaryClass' with 'keywords' - that's too much of an intervention!

All tests done with bibutils 5.11.

Suggestion for a solution

Consider transforming 'primaryClass' with bib2xml to an XML subject element with a 'class' attribute set to 'primary', e.g.:

<subject class="primary">
    <topic>math.DG</topic>
</subject>

so that xml2bib will know that this subject must be mapped to 'primaryClass' in the .bib, while other subjects should be mapped to keywords.

[Chris Karakas]

You might of course want to try this:

<subject>
    <topic class="primary">math.DG</topic>
</subject>

It depends on your model (DTD) for the XML format.

[Chris Putnam]

I've added the support for arXiv references into version 6.0. I still don't export the eprintClass/primaryClass information into references formats other than bibtex. I'm not sure what those format might want.

Thanks for the report.