[Tex/LaTex] When running Bibtex with a statement that has a comma at the end, this is obscuring real problems

bibtexwarnings

When I run bibtex on document with a citation such as \cite{European00Presidency} and the .bib entry looks like this:

@MISC{European00Presidency,    
  author = {European Council,},
  title = {Presidency conclusions},
  year = {2000},
  keywords = {Lisbon Strategy},
  publisher = {European Council,},
  type = {Government Document},
  url = {http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/00100-r1.en0.htm}
}

I get the very unhelpful warning message that " "European Council," has a comma at the end for entry European00Presidency" Which i really don't care about. But it hides other warnings such as entry not found or what ever. I would like to turn that warning off in Bibtex. Does anyone know how to do that.

I'm using MikTex 2.9, Jabref 2.9.2 and texmaker 4.1.1

As this is a problem for anyone dealing with large numbers of corporate authors I think there should be an option of changing this

Best Answer

while this is not clearly documented in the "usual" places, in "guide to latex" by kopka & daly, it is stated in section 12.2.4, regarding names, that

Anything enclosed in braces will be treated as a single item, something that is used in ambiguous cases, or when the name contains a comma or the word and. An example is
"{Harvey and Sons, Ltd}"

thus my advice is to omit the comma, but wrap an additional pair of braces around the element, as

author = {{European Council}},

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[Tex/LaTex] How to run bibtex after using the -output-directory flag with pdflatex, when files are included from subdirectories

Ok I finally figured it out (not sure if this is documented somewhere already):

I needed to explicitly create directories within out having the same name as the directories I include files from. Then, I need to be in the out directory when running bibtex. Furthermore, the bibtex file needs to be manually copied to the out directory. Finally, I run pdflatex a second time from the top-level directory, again with the -output-directory flag.

In summary (starting in the directory containing parent.tex):

mkdir out/include
pdflatex -output-directory=out parent.tex
cp mybib.bib out
cd out ; bibtex parent
cd .. ; pdflatex -output-directory=out parent.tex

(and maybe you need to run pdflatex again, depending on what packages you're using...)

[Tex/LaTex] Comma at the end of last BibTeX field

It is just to be safe. If you later want to add a new field entry in your bib file it happens very often that you forgot to add the missing comma in the field before.

@entry_type{internal_key,
  field_1 = "value_1",
  field_2 = "value_2",
  ...
  field_n = "value_n"
  new_field = "newValue"
}

So with the added new_field you will have compiling errors because the comma after field_n is missing. If you always write the comma this error can't happen:

Write always

@entry_type{internal_key,
  field_1 = "value_1",
  field_2 = "value_2",
  ...
  field_n = "value_n",
}

to avoid this error.

A good hint comes from krlmlr in his comment: "Also, this makes a subtle difference when you use version control for the .bib file: If a comma terminates the last field, you do not have to touch this line to add another field, and it's easier to track the origin of this line (e.g., with svn annotate)."

And tohecz comments: "As well, the auto-generation is simpler then. It's the same reason as why you can have comma after list array item in C++."

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to run bibtex after using the -output-directory flag with pdflatex, when files are included from subdirectories

[Tex/LaTex] Comma at the end of last BibTeX field

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