biblatex, abbreviated and full journal titles -- best practice?

[Henning Haida]

Hi TeXies,

is there a best practice for biblatex/biber users to deal with full and
abbreviated journal titles?

I know (but never used) about a solution with bibtex and bibtex strings.
One could define bibtex strings and then write two files: A) the string
and the full name, and a second B) the string a the journal
abbreviation. Then, by including file A or B, respectively, in the
bibliography the full or abbreviated name appears. This looks quite
elegant for me, however, I never used it until now.

It's very good described here,
http://www.latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=690#p2325.

Basically, biblatex supports bibtex strings, but I couldn't find some
hints how to use and what about future development (such like a package
option journaltitles=full or journaltitles=abbreviated ...).

What do you think? What's a smart way to switch easily between full and
abbreviated names in a bibliography while keeping maximum information
(somehow) in the bib-file(s)? Is the `traditional' method still the best
and will it be compatible with biblatex/biber in future?


Regards,
Henning

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <jiqvhl$gug$1...@news.albasani.net>, Henning Haida

<losm...@midnightallstars.de> writes:

> is there a best practice for biblatex/biber users to deal with full and
> abbreviated journal titles?
>
> I know (but never used) about a solution with bibtex and bibtex strings.
> One could define bibtex strings and then write two files: A) the string
> and the full name, and a second B) the string a the journal
> abbreviation. Then, by including file A or B, respectively, in the
> bibliography the full or abbreviated name appears. This looks quite
> elegant for me, however, I never used it until now.

I do something similar; strings are in a BibTeX file. I have separate
BibTeX files anyway for my own stuff, other authors' stuff etc so it is
just one more.

Usually, this is an aspect of the journal style. So, you could have one
file per journal (many would be identical which means you could use the
same file).

[Henning Haida]

Am 02.03.2012 20:52, schrieb Phillip Helbig---undress to reply:
> In article <jiqvhl$gug$1...@news.albasani.net>, Henning Haida

>> One could define bibtex strings and then write two files: A) the string
>> and the full name, and a second B) the string a the journal
>> abbreviation. Then, by including file A or B, respectively, in the
>> bibliography the full or abbreviated name appears. This looks quite
>> elegant for me, however, I never used it until now.
>
> I do something similar; strings are in a BibTeX file.

Now I do the same and it works fine with biblatex/biber. By the way
biblatex defines a field "shortjournal". However, since journal name's
are used multiple times it is very comfortable to use strings for them.
And then, it is likely to keep two bib-files just with full or
abbreviated journal names (rather than define two strings and put them
into the fields `journaltitle' or `shortjournal').

[Dominik Waßenhoven]

Henning Haida wrote:

> Basically, biblatex supports bibtex strings, but I couldn't find some
> hints how to use and what about future development (such like a package
> option journaltitles=full or journaltitles=abbreviated ...).

In the biblatex-dw styles, I implemented the option ‘shortjournal’ for
this.

,--[ biblatex-dw documentation ]
¦ If the option shortjournal is set to ‘true’, the field shortjournal is
¦ used instead of journaltitle.
`----

This could be adapted for other styles without too much effort, I guess.

Regards,
Dominik.-
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