[Tex/LaTex] Why is ‘publisher’ not a mandatory field for books in biblatex in contrast to bibtex

Question

The documentation of bibtex states that 'Publisher' is a mandatory field for a book entry.
The bibliography manager jabref and bibdesk follow this rule.

In the case of biblatex the documentation
says that it isn't.

I am not an expert in official citation policies, however, IMHO publisher should be mandatory. Why does biblatex differ from bibtex/jabref/bibdesk?

Related questions:

• How to validate (check) a biblatex .bib file?
• How can one validate a bib file?

Answer 1

It's important to remember that 'required' for a classical BibTeX style means broadly 'The output might look odd without this field': BibTeX is not really trying to do data validation!

When Philipp Lehman wrote biblatex he looked carefully at what was and wasn't common in bibliographies and tried to make a sensible set of standard styles. He also set up biblatex so that in the main missing fields (even 'required' ones) don't give badly formatted output, although from the point of view of looking up references it may be sub-optimal. The 'required' fields are therefore best viewed as a suggestion for the minimum set that are needed to have any kind of 'reasonable' output, and are deliberately kept to as small a set as possible.

If you wish to do data validation, you really need to look at a range of issues not limited to the simple question of 'which fields have some content'.