Re: [Refdb-users] no-formatting of given name(s) in some publications

[Bruce D'A. <bd...@fa...>]

On Jan 14, 2004, at 12:20 PM, Marc Herbert wrote:

> Conclusion: I would of course never pretend that the majority of
> publications let people write their _given_ name(s) as they want. I
> just don't know. But a short investigation seems to show that at least
> a non-negligeable number of non-negligeable journals does.

This is true.  I actually "posted" something on this the other day, but 
accidentally sent only to Markus.  His response was

> I knew that one out of a million styles would ask for this, so we'll
> have to support it. The cleanest way is to record the original string,
> if available, in the displayForm element *in addition* to the
> parseable data. MODS seems well equipped for these bordercases.

I'm not convinced BibTeX is the final authority on these issues, 
incidentally.  The bottom line is that any data model and the 
formatting engine itself needs to have some concept of a hierarchy of 
given names, or one must -- by definition -- modify the data or rely on 
fallible algorithms to get proper output formatting.

When I look at a lot of bibtex data, names are not in a form I would 
consider ideal; stuff like:

@BOOK{Raymer,
     AUTHOR = "Raymer, Daniel P.",
     TITLE = "Aircraft Design : a Conceptual Approach",
     SERIES = "AIAA Education Series",
     PUBLISHER = {American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics},
     ADDRESS = {Washington, D.C.},
     YEAR = 1989}

...or even worse:

@BOOK{Peak,
     AUTHOR = "Peak, D. W.",
     TITLE = "Developments In The Air Cargo Industry",
     PUBLISHER = {ICHCA Abford House},
     ADDRESS = {London, UK},
     YEAR = 1981}

As I've said before, I'd be comfortable myself with abbreviating the 
middle name in my metadata.  I do this all the time, in fact.  But I do 
think it's important to realize the bibtex solution relies on this.

Bruce