BibLaTeX number field for books, manuals, and reports

biblatex

The biblatex manual describes the number field as

The number of a journal or the volume/number of a book in a series. See also
issue as well as §§ 2.3.7, 2.3.10, 2.3.11. With @patent entries, this is the number or
record token of a patent or patent request.

The meaning for journal articles and patents makes sense to me. However, the number field applies to a number of other entries according to that manual. Specifically, all of the following:

| entry         | description           |
|---------------+-----------------------|
| article       | Journal issue number. |
| book          |                       |
| mvbook        |                       |
| inbook        |                       |
| collection    |                       |
| mvcollection  |                       |
| incollection  |                       |
| dataset       |                       |
| manual        |                       |
| patent        | Patent number.        |
| periodical    |                       |
| proceedings   |                       |
| mvproceedings |                       |
| inproceedings |                       |
| report        |                       |

For a book, how does number differ from volume? From the description, it sounds like they mean the same thing in this context. If so, why not just use volume?

What is the meaning for a manual entry? I'm citing a manual for some electronic equipment that declares a part number ("HP Document Part Number 03458-90033"). Would "03458-90033" be a correct usage of the number field in this context?

Finally, reports are often identified with a numeric identifier. And, frequently this just counts up from 1 where 1 is the first report published by the organization (e.g., application note 98). I presume this is what is meant by number in the context of a report. Is that correct?

Best Answer

For all @book- and @inbook-like entry types (@book, @mvbook, @collection, @mvcollection, @incollection, @proceedings, @(mv)proceedings, @inproceedings) number refers to the number or volume (the terminology here differs from case to case) of the relevant book in a series. volume on the other hand goes with maintitle and describes the number of the volume in a multi-volume work. For more on this distinction see Whether to use `number` or `volume` in the bib file for a book numbered in a series?, Omit Vol and Issue/No? and Series not appearing in Biber natbib APA inproceedings reference.

For @report, number goes with type and is a perfect fit for IDs like "working paper 120", "technical report 99-02".

For @manual, number goes with series in the standard styles (I'm guessing mainly because it is modelled on what the BibTeX base styles did, where @manual was quite probably more or less a printed book). That probably means that by default things might not quite work for "HP Document Part Number 03458-90033" which would be closer to the type+number setup of @report. But with some tweaks you can probably get things to look nice as well.

For @dataset, number also goes with series.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to cite a number of a journal’s volume

Here is a solution, if I've well understood what you want:

\documentclass[12pt,twoside,a4paper, french]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{filecontents}
 \begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
 @article{test,
   author = {Author},
   title = {Title},
   journaltitle = {Journal},
   year = 2015,
   issue = 2,
   volume = 167,
   pages = {67--88}}
 \end{filecontents}
\usepackage[autostyle=true]{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=verbose,
     hyperref,
     backend=biber,
     date=year]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\DefineBibliographyExtras{french}{\def\bibrangedash{ à~}}
%
\renewbibmacro*{journal+issuetitle}{%
 \usebibmacro{journal}%
 \setunit*{\addspace}%
 \iffieldundef{series}
 {}
 {\newunit
 \printfield{series}%
 \setunit{\addspace}}%
 \usebibmacro{issue+date}%
 \setunit{\addspace}%
 \usebibmacro{volume+number+eid}%
 \setunit{\addcolon\space}%
 \usebibmacro{issue}%
 \newunit}

\renewbibmacro*{issue+date}{%
      \iffieldundef{issue}
      {\usebibmacro{date}}
      {\usebibmacro{date}%
       \setunit*{\addslash}
      \printfield{issue}%%
}%
  \newunit}

\renewbibmacro*{volume+number+eid}{%
  \printtext[parens]{%
  \printfield{volume}%
  \setunit*{\adddot}%
  \printfield{number}%
  \setunit{\addcomma\space}%
  \printfield{eid}}}

\begin{document}

\cite{test}

\printbibliography

 \end{document}

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Canonical List of Bib Entry Types

I'm afraid there is no universal list. Each style can define its own list of supported entry types (and fields!).

The core set of entry types and fields documented for the base BibTeX styles in btxdoc (the BibTeX documentation) is probably supported pretty universally, but I would expect that even for those types and fields there are probably styles that deviate from the "standard" behaviour/interpretation. More modern styles will generally add support for fields like url and doi and may or may not introduce a dedicated type for online resources (instead of the generic @misc).

The core biblatex styles and most contributed biblatex styles support the types listed in the biblatex documentation. Again, it is perfectly acceptable for styles to add new entry types or fields (and in some instances it may even be appropriate to remove support for certain entry types).

Note that the German translation of the biblatex documentation is provided by a third party (and not by the biblatex development team) and may not always be completely up-to-date with the 'official' English documentation. In particular the wording in the title of section §2.1.3 Non-standard Types was changed from the confusing 'Unsupported Types' to 'Non-standard Types' a while ago (https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/753). Even the current heading has the potential to cause confusion, but it was the best I could come up with.

Depending on what your software is supposed to do, it may be a good idea to just accept all syntactically well-formed .bib entries (no matter which type) or to let your user choose between the base BibTeX types and standard biblatex types with an additional option to add custom entry types and fields.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to cite a number of a journal’s volume

Canonical List of Bib Entry Types

Related Question