[Tex/LaTex] First published field in biblatex

biblatex

I don't really know if this post is a question or a suggestion that would need to be directly addressed to the create of the very (very) good biblatex package.

It often happen, especially in humanities and social sciences, that a book was firstly published in one precise year and was published again several time to had a preface, notes, comments and even to update some data. In this case, editorial rules may require the author to refer to the book by giving not only the year of publication of the book consulted but also the year it has been published for the time between brackets.

I did not find any way to do it. Would it be possible to add a "firstpublished" field in the bib document that could be read by biblatex package?

Thank you so much

Best Answer

The biblatex package does have a field called origdate for precisely that purpose:

origdate If the work is a translation, a reprint, or something similar, the publication date of the original edition. Not used by the standard bibliography styles.

from the biblatex documentation, p. 21.

As the qupte says it is not used by the standard bibliography styles, but you may include it by extending whatever bibliography style you use. See p. 133-134 of the manual for how to use the dates in a bibliography style.

As @Johannes_B notes there is also a data field edition (p. 16):

edition The edition of a printed publication. This must be an integer, not an ordinal. Don’t say edition={First} or edition={1st} but edition={1} . The bibliography style converts this to a language dependent ordinal. It is also possible to give the edition as a literal string, for example “Third, revised and expanded edition”

And for even more detail, fields origpublisher, origtitle and reprinttitle are also available (p. 21-22).

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