TITLE: BibLaTeX reference formatting
DATE: 2021-07-15
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
====================================================================
I was preparing references for a paper I submitted to a journal.
The journal had some pretty specific reference formatting criteria,
and for whatever reason submitting a .bib file wasn't enough for
them. I have been using biblatex for quite some time, but have
always puzzled over how to customise the citations and reference
list. Formatted references are very ambiguous, with innumerable
different ways to display the same information. As such,
customising the output of BibLaTeX is also quite complex, as it has
to deal with the many edge cases that occur in author names, and
the many different types of reference.
After some trial and error I configured BibLaTeX so the references
and citations looked sensible. I thought I would go through the
customisations I made and explain what effect they have.
First, here is my basic .tex file, which includes some necessary
preamble material and then prints some references:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[natbib,
backend=biber
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{ref.bib}
\begin{document}
Ref. 1: \citep{Jost2007}
Ref. 2: \citep{Fick2017}
Ref. 3: \citep{Dinerstein2017}
Ref. 4: \citep{Adole2018a}
Ref. 5: \citep{Adole2018b}
Ref. 6: \citep{VIPPHEN}
Ref. 7: \citep{Fake2021}
\printbibliography{}
\end{document}
I'm using natbib syntax to write the citations, and biber as a
bibliography parsing engine.
ref.bib looks like this:
" One author article
@article{Jost2007,
author = {Jost, L.},
title = {Partitioning diversity into independent alpha and
beta components},
year = 2007,
journal = {Ecology},
volume = {88},
number = {10},
pages = {2427--2439},
DOI = {10.1890/06-1736.1}
}
" Two author article
@article{Fick2017,
author = {Fick, S. E. and Hijmans, R. J.},
title = {WorldClim 2: {New} 1‐km spatial resolution climate
surfaces for global land areas},
year = 2017,
journal = {International Journal of Climatology},
volume = {37},
number = {12},
pages = {4302--4315},
DOI = {10.1002/joc.5086}
}
" Two articles with same authors:
" The first
@article{Adole2018a,
doi = {10.1111/gcb.14310},
year = 2018,
publisher = {Wiley},
volume = {24},
number = {9},
pages = {4054--4068},
author = {Adole, T. and Dash, J. and Atkinson, P. M.},
title = {Large-scale prerain vegetation green-up across
Africa},
journal = {Global Change Biology}
}
" The second
@article{Adole2018b,
doi = {10.1016/j.apgeog.2017.12.006},
year = 2018,
publisher = {Elsevier {BV}},
volume = {90},
pages = {187--199},
author = {Adole, T. and Dash, J. and Atkinson, P. M.},
title = {Characterising the land surface phenology of Africa
using 500~m {MODIS} {EVI}},
journal = {Applied Geography}
}
" Long author list
@article{Dinerstein2017,
doi = {10.1093/biosci/bix014},
year = 2017,
publisher = {Oxford University Press ({OUP})},
volume = {67},
number = {6},
pages = {534--545},
author = {Dinerstein, E. and Olson, D. and Joshi, A. and
Vynne, C. and Burgess, N. D. and Wikramanayake, E. and Hahn, N. and
Palminteri, S. and Hedao, P. and Noss, R. and Hansen, M. and Locke,
H. and Ellis, E. C. and Jones, B. and Barber, C. V. and Hayes, R.
and Kormos, C. and Martin, V. and Crist, E. and Sechrest, W. and
Price, L. and Baillie, J. E. M. and Weeden, D. and Suckling, K. and
Davis, C. and Sizer, N. and Moore, R. and Thau, D. and Birch, T.
and Potapov, P. and Turubanova, S. and Tyukavina, A. and de Souza,
N. and Pintea, L. and Brito, J. C. and Llewellyn, O. A. and Miller,
A. G. and Patzelt, A. and Ghazanfar, S. A. and Timberlake, J. and
Kl\"{o}ser, H. and Shennan-Farp\'{o}n, Y. and Kindt, R. and
Lilles{\o}, J. B. and van Breugel, P. and Graudal, L. and Voge, M.
and Al-Shammari, K. F. and Saleem, M.},
title = {An ecoregion-based approach to protecting half the
terrestrial realm},
journal = {{BioScience}}
}
" Book
@book{Legendre1998,
author = {Pierre Legendre, and Louis Legendre},
title = {Numerical Ecology, 2nd edition},
year = 1998,
publisher = {Elsevier},
address = {Amsterdam, Netherlands}
}
" Dataset
@dataset{VIPPHEN,
author = {Didan, L. and Barreto, A.},
title = {{NASA MEaSUREs Vegetation Index and Phenology (VIP)
Phenology EVI2 Yearly Global 0.05Deg CMG [Data set]}},
year = {2016},
doi = {10.5067/MEaSUREs/VIP/VIPPHEN_EVI2.004},
publisher = {NASA EOSDIS Land Processes DAAC},
urldate = {2020-08-05}
}
" Hypothetical reference with a lot of non-standard names
@article{Fake2021,
year = 2021,
volume = {656},
number = {2},
pages = {1--5},
author = {Godlee, E. L. G. and de Olson, D. and van den
Joshi, A. and der Vynne, C. and Den Burgess, N. D. and MacNail, E.
and Shennan-Farp\'{o}n, Y. and Mute, S.-P.},
title = {This is a fake reference},
journal = {{Nature}}
}
All these references were chosen to highlight some of the diversity
of bibliographic entries I have experienced.
The basic document produces a file like this:
The first thing to change is the basic reference style. Currently
the references are numbered, but I prefer the author-year style, so
I alter the biblatex options to look like this:
\usepackage[natbib,
backend=biber,
style=authoryear
]{biblatex}
which produces this document:
There are a few issues that still need to be solved, so I'll go
through them one by one.
Firstly, the number of names reported in both the citations and the
reference list is not how I would like it. For example, Adole et
al. (2018a) has three authors in the citation, but I would prefer
one author then et al. if there are more than two authors. Also,
Dinerstein et al. (2017) only has one author then et al. in the
reference list, but I want to list up to 10 authors then et al., so
I alter the biblatex options once more:
\usepackage[natbib,
backend=biber,
style=authoryear,
maxcitenames=2,
mincitenames=1,
minbibnames=10,
maxbibnames=10
]{biblatex}
This allows up to two names in the citations before et al., and if
et al. is used, only the first author name is given. Also a maximum
of 10 names is displayed in the reference list, but if there are
fewer than 10 then all names are displayed.
Next, BibLaTeX has decided that if two papers have the same author
list, that the second paper can omit the author list in place of a
dash. I don't like this, so I change the options again:
\usepackage[natbib,
backend=biber,
style=authoryear,
maxcitenames=2,
mincitenames=1,
minbibnames=10,
maxbibnames=10,
uniquename=false,
uniquelist=false,
dashed=false
]{biblatex}
This prints the full author list for every repeat.
Next, the Legendre and Legendre (1998) reference has provided the
full first names for each author in the .bib file. This is valid
BibTeX syntax, but BibLaTeX then defaults to printing those first
names in the reference rather than the initials, which looks messy
when using a mix of initials and full names. So I configure
BibLaTeX to always use initials.
\usepackage[natbib,
backend=biber,
style=authoryear,
maxcitenames=2,
mincitenames=1,
minbibnames=10,
maxbibnames=10,
uniquename=false,
uniquelist=false,
dashed=false,
giveninits=true
]{biblatex}
Finally, and this might be a bit nit-picky, I would prefer to use
an ampersand rather than "and" when listing the final author name,
both in the citations and the reference list, so I add this line to
the document preamble:
\renewcommand*\finalnamedelim{\addspace\&\space}
