[Tex/LaTex] Invalid ISBN in value of field ‘isbn’ (-1)

biberbiblatexwarnings

I have a little problem with biber. When I run it with --validate_datamodel, it warns me

WARN – Datamodel: Entry 'unep2016' (mybibfile.bib): Invalid ISBN in value of field 'isbn' (-1)

As "it does not matter if you use the 13 or 10 digit format" (Guido), the warning must come from somewhere else. I have tried the ISBN as 9789280735806 and with hyphens in different places, e.g. 978-9280-7358-06. Here's the bib entry:

@book{unep2016,
location = {Nairobi},
author = {UNEP},
publisher = {United Nations Environment Programme},
isbn = {9789280735806},
title = {{Marine Plastic debris and microplastics - Global lessons and research to inspire action and guide policy change}},
year = {2016}
}

Best Answer

Biber does not only check the datamodel integrity, it also explicitly checks ISBNs for validity when in --validate_datamodel mode. As it turns out 978-92-807-3580-6 (9789280735806) as indicated on the report's copyright page is not a valid ISBN Most likely the last digit (the check digit) should be a 2 instead.

ISBN validation was implemented following discussions in Automatically validate and format ISBNs. With --isbn-normalise you can get hyphens in the right place even if they are missing in the .bib file. --isbn13 forces 13-digit ISBNs, --isbn10 the old 10-digit format.

Remarks from the original poster: solution with JabRef

The date fields in my bibtex file were constructed with slashes / instead of dashes -, so e. g. 2013/8// instead of 2013-08 (and even double slashes // when the day was missing).

So I used JabRef 2.10 to

replace all / in datefields by - (caution: if you should really have used date ranges which use the / then you might mess up your dates with that!!!)
then in date fields replace all -- with - and had removed many of my problems (but not all).
I then finally found that the information was redundant, as it was contained in year and month as well as in the date field, so I decided to just remove the date fields for those entries which also had year and month defined.

In general, the regexp search/filter capabilities of JabRef were very helpful here, e. g. year=[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9] and month=[0-9] and date!="" for finding fields with year and month defined and date not empty.

(I also cleaned up the DOIs as proposed by @moewe in the comments)

[Tex/LaTex] Why does biber say a checked-valid ISBN is invalid

There can only be one ISBN in the isbn field.

WARN - ISBN '0-13-603313-X, 978-0-13-603313-4' in entry 'sheldon' is invalid - run biber with '--validate_datamodel' for details.

it looks awfully like you have two ISBNs in the isbn field as in

isbn = {0-13-603313-X, 978-0-13-603313-4},

Throw away one of the two ISBNs and Biber will stop complaining

isbn = {978-0-13-603313-4},

The same holds for the url and doi field. Here Biber will not complain, but the output will be mangled, especially when hyperref is loaded.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] biblatex error: invalid format of field ‘date’ – what’s wrong

Remarks from the original poster: solution with JabRef

[Tex/LaTex] Why does biber say a checked-valid ISBN is invalid

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