I am using LyX with a slightly modified vancouver.bst
file. In the PDF output, reference titles that end with a question mark have a period also printed. This occurs only for those references that use the "misc" entry type. For example, one output is:
U. S. Geological Survey. Forecasting California’s Earthquakes—What Can
We Expect in the Next 30 Years?. 2008.
Note the "?." following the title.
The entry for this reference is:
@Misc{USG08,
Author = {{U.S. Geological Survey}},
Title = {Forecasting {C}alifornia's {E}arthquakes---{W}hat
{C}an {W}e {E}xpect in the {N}ext 30 {Y}ears?},
year = 2008
}
You can find the modified version of vancouver.bst
on PasteBin.
I have read the responses to a similar question "remove comma after title ending with questionmark." But I could not get any of the ideas there to work, or I did not implement them properly. I do not understand bst files very well.
Can anyone offer hacks to the .bst
file that would remove the extra periods?
Best Answer
here's a hack that does raise some warnings in bibtex, but appears to produce the desired output.
in this test file, i added a definition for
\killpunct
, to ignore the next token in the input, which will be the (inserted by bibtex) period.i made one change to the bib entry -- adding
\killpunct
after the question mark in the title -- and called the filebibpunct.bib
:note that there are no extra braces around
\killpunct
.here is the output:
the bibtex run did raise some warnings:
i didn't explore
modified_vancouver.bst
to see what might be causing this; there's nothing wrong that i can see with theauthor
field in the.bib
input. if this were my project, i would look for documentation on the.bst
file, or try to ask its author what is expected from a@misc
entry.