[Tex/LaTex] Biblatex: Inconsistent name-format

biblatex

I use biblatex to manage my references. It works quite well, except for this strange behaviour:

[1] Agresti, A. and Finlay, B. Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences.
    3rd ed. Prentice Hall, 1997.
...

[3] L. Brozovsky and V. Petricek. “Recommender System for Online Dating Service”. In: CoRR
    abs/cs/0703042 (2007).

As you can see, article-references have a different name-format than do book-references. I want to force the following style: surname, first-letter-of-firstname. How can I do it?

The following commands are used to create the bibliography.

\usepackage[style=ieee,backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{db.bib} 
\printbibliography[heading=bibnumbered]

@book{medianmean,
    author={{Agresti, A. and Finlay, B.}},
    title={Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences},
    publisher={Prentice Hall},
    edition={3},
    year={1997}
}

@article{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-cs-0703042,
    author    = {Brozovsky, L. and Petricek, V.},
    title     = {Recommender System for Online Dating Service},
    journal   = {CoRR},
    volume    = {abs/cs/0703042},
    year      = {2007},
    ee        = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0703042},
    bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}

Best Answer

Change your first entry to remove the extra set of braces in the author:

@book{medianmean,
    author={Agresti, A. and Finlay, B.},
    title={Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences},
    publisher={Prentice Hall},
    edition={3},
    year={1997}
}

By having this extra set of braces, you are telling biblatex that the whole line is effectively one last name, and it prevents things from breaking up semantically the way it is intended.

Remember that whenever you want to tell biblatex (or bibtex) that something should be kept just the way you write it, you can wrap it in another set of braces. This keeps a title like "The creation of the {I}nternet" with the proper capitalization. This "feature" is what you ran into and was causing the issue you observed.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Adapting an existing biblatex style in order to imitate Springer’s author-year reference list rules for authors

There's a lot of questions here. Maybe some that are rather subjective. Rather than produce an essay I'll try to answer your questions.

Yes, the process is handcrafted, if you won't accept or live with one of the standard or common styles, or at least if you need to make more than a few changes to them. With respect, the reason is clear once you look at your own question. You have found a style you like, but you would like a few little things changed: a full stop after some parentheses, and the book name. Fortunately or unfortunately, everyone has these little quirks: corner cases, inconsistencies, favourite little points. This is life. And in the end that means handcrafting. A lot can be done by changing macros, so that the rough work is done quickly. But it's these "little things" that take time.

Sometimes this becomes a bit frustrating, as one wonders whether this or that feature of a citation style is really required. All of them more-or-less convey the same information, which is really part of the problem: because then we have room for endless debate on matters of taste, about which people, being people, can sometimes feel strongly. To some extent the degree to which your style has to be handcrafted depends on your own ability to live with something that isn't quite exactly what you want. If you could resign yourself to using, say APA or Chicago style, we have exactly what you need. You are driven to bespoke by an exquisite refusal to be seen wearing something off-the-peg: as is your prerogative.

Bibtex of course managed the semi-homemade approach via makebst. But it's a much simpler system: because of the complexity of biblatex, I doubt such a system is viable. At any rate it would be a huge amount of work, and doesn't exist. The nearest biblatex comes to that is actually the highly configurable styles like the DW styles; but they are not really focussed on your author/year system.
In terms of styles to look at, there are two fairly mature styles that are focussed on author-year citations: biblatex-chicago (which you load as a package of its own) in its authordate version, and biblatex-apa. The former is quite a way from what you want. The latter is pretty close, actually, to your format (though with more periods and punctuation than you like), but might be a good starting point for customization. This does not "meet your needs" if you mean "look exactly as you want your style to look", but it is a totally competent modern citation style which conforms very closely to an established style-guide.
For modification, I'd always start with a standard style (unless it's really a question of tiny tweaks). In your case, I'd probably work from authoryear (or one of its close variants -- though before that I'd look at the code for APA to see if it might be a closer fit.
There is no perfect single source. My own experience, beyond the questions you have identified, is that one got most help from the biblatex documentation, but sometimes even more from the source code, especially biblatex.def and standard.bbx, which you need to keep at hand. They provide the copious examples that the technical documentation rather lacks.

A few suggestions:

Please, please, see if you can't bring yourself to use a style like APA or Chicago, with minimal modification (e.g. to remove unnecessary periods after initials and the like). This would be very much simpler. If you can't, and you are determined to roll your own ...
Ask yourself why you are using biblatex. I'm a huge fan of it, because in my field it is essential: you simply cannot have adequate legal bibliographies with bibtex. You may need it for all sorts of reasons. But if you are not going to need its advanced features, but aim for nothing that bibtex could not do, but are determined on a bespoke approach, then going the makebst route might be better for you. (Or modifying the Springer .bst files which are, I think, available.)
If the answer to those questions is that you are going to use biblatex but produce your own style then
- start with the book, article, inbook and incollection drivers, in that order. Once you've got them, you are more than half way there usually.
- when tackling the drivers, use a variety of test data that you are confident about (i.e. you are sure how it should end up being printed). Change only a bit at a time. Make sure to test with unexpected data too.
- test very frequently. It's horribly easy to introduce some annoying little error like an extra space somewhere, which can be hell to track down later.
- sort out the punctuation (\newunitpunct and friends) as the first thing you do. Spend some time studying the documentation's quite lengthy description of the punctuation system, which is cunning and useful, but not immediately intuitive.
- encapsulate as much as you can so that you get repeatable units: aim for drivers which are simply a succession of \printfield, \newunit, \newblock and \usebibmacro, without any heavy logic or formatting built in. Use \bibmacros to control logic, and the various \format...ing directives to deal with formatting and typography.
- you are going to need to revise (not, of course, edit: make a new alternative) at least one .lbx file because they are stuffed full of full stops after abbreviations.
- try to build a style which will precisely follow the Springer one, and then add your tweaks (perhaps with an option), so that you can make the style available to others.

[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX using inconsistent name format in the case of two authors

Just add \DeclareNameAlias{sortname}{last-first} to your preamble.

Consider the output of the following minimal working example (MWE):

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{Abramowitz,
author = "Abramowitz, M. and Stegun, I.",
title  = "Handbook of Mathematical Functions",
publisher = {Dover Publications},
year = "1965" }
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\DeclareNameAlias{sortname}{last-first}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

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Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Adapting an existing biblatex style in order to imitate Springer’s author-year reference list rules for authors

[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX using inconsistent name format in the case of two authors

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