I have a few questions on biblatex regarding patent citations which I think has very poor support only; my workflow is as follows:
- search Google patents
- use zotero connector and import patent to zotero
- zotero+betterbiblatex does all the magic
- then I export as .bib to use it in my document
This creates a patent like this:
@patent{abc123,
title = {This is just an example},
number = {US1234567A},
date = {1990-01-01},
keywords = {biblatex, example},
holder = {Doe, John and Doe, Jessica}
}
In my document I use the following settings:
\usepackage[maxbibnames=99, sorting=none, backend=biber, style=numeric]{biblatex}
Okay, now my questions:
- there are only patent holders, no authors; in zotero there is no 'authors field' I could use once the type is set to 'patent'. The result is: \citeauthor does not work. I would prefer keeping the type 'patent' in zotero and not switch to misc.
- related issue: when typesetting the bibliography, the patent holders
are listed after the title of the patent, not before it as it would
be the case for authors, how to fix that? - generally, I do not like that zotero exports the patents with just one date which happens to be the date the patent was granted; I would be much more interested in the filing/priority date (since it is often important when someone first had the idea, I'm not interested in seeing how long it took for the patent office to grant the patent …). Is it possible to export the filing/priority date instead of the date the patent was granted? Alternatively, have both dates in the output?
Best Answer
Useful patent entries look like this (abridged from biblatex-examples.bib)
In particular the Inventor (in Zotero's notation) should be exported to
author
and the Assignee/Holder should be exported toholder
only if it does not coincide with theauthor
list.Furthermore a
@patent
entry should have atype
, either the generictype = {patent},
or preferable one of the available typespatenteu
,patentus
, ... In case a non-generic type is used, thenumber
field may contain the patent number without the country prefix.The
location
field can and should be used if the (geographic) scope of the patent is different from the scope implied by thetype
. This is probably rarely the case, certainly for US patents withtype = {patentus},
that apply only to the US thelocation
field is omissible.This are all things that should be fixed on the Zotero side or failing that could be requested as features at least for Better Bib(La)TeX: https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/issues
The date issue is a bit trickier.
biblatex
only allows one genericdate
for@patent
s and does not specify whether that should be the filing date, priority date or issue date (date granted). Zotero is free to choose which date to export and I certainly won't argue against choosing the issue date.On the
biblatex
side it would be possible to declare a new date (prioritydate
,filingdate
,issuedate
, ...) and use that. See Biblatex: Custom date fields and How can I create entirely new data types with BibLaTeX/Biber? for guidance.On the Zotero side you will have to convince Zotero to export to the new date or to export an existing date to
date
.Below you can see how to convince Zotero (with Better Bib(La)TeX) to export the filing date (
filingDate
) todate
. But of course that strategy can be applied ion other cases as well.For reference you may want to have a look at http://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/scripting/
Go to "Edit > Preferences > Better BibTeX > Advanced" and add the following to the postscript field (simplified thanks to retorquere)
Zotero's Better BibLaTeX export should then export the filing date to the
date
field instead of the issue date.