make with-titles version of aasjournal.bst

[joeharr4]

This is another service-to-the-community issue.

Many formats want or require titles in references:

NASA and NSF grant proposals want them. Papers written for classes often want them. Your CV wants them. Some journals (e.g., Icarus) want them, and don't provide a .bst.

Could a with-titles version be made? Or, could the actual source be made available, so someone like me can make this minor hack? I do hope there is a real source that got put through something like that TeX file that asks you questions and spits out a .bst, rather than being manually hacked together in the BibTeX language. Almost nobody in the world knows how to hack BibTeX.

The right place for the title is after the year and before the publication info (journal, publisher, etc.). Put a comma before and after it.

--jh--

[augustfly]

As a matter of Journal style I'll just quickly comment that this is a repeatedly discussed issue, which inevitably reverts back to the status quo under pressure from those who demand as compact as possible documents. It may/will be discussed further with the launch of The Planetary Science Journal.

[joeharr4]

To be clear, I'm not asking for a change in journal style, just a .bst file in addition to the standard one, that we can use for our own purposes. Of course, now that print is dead, there is little argument for extremely brief bibliographies, which the AAS seems to stand alone on in all of publishing. The planetary community will be happier with titles in bibs, and I would suggest making the journal's format as familiar as possible. But, that's a debate for a different forum.

--jh--

[augustfly]

I'm amazed by how many times I've said to myself, "print is dead; compactness can't matter in article style" and be proven wrong by folks wanting tight 2 column layouts, no extra spacing anywhere, figures with aspect ratios < 0.5 crammed into 1 column, short reference sections, etc. As if arXiv charged by the page.

And FWIW we think this is a good forum for some of these detailed discussions.

[joeharr4]

Compactness matters, up to a point. The more I can see on one page, the easier it is to refer around to different things being discussed. More than 80 characters wide is hard to read fast, and people are trained to speed-read down narrow columns of text. However, in the references, adding the title tells you which paper you're talking about. Most of us don't remember the volume and page numbers of Smith's 2014 article, nor often even the exact year. Since nobody reads the references like they read paragraphs of text and you don't go back and forth between different reference lines, but rather back and forth between the references as a whole and the text, adding titles is a big win. There used to be a financial cost to this, but there isn't anymore. Again, the AAS journals are the ONLY journals I'm aware of that do this silly omission of the title. I've never heard an argument against titles other than the cost of the paper. If someone has one, please, by all means, comment. If the argument is the AAS charging model, that can change to omit the references, or count them by number rather than length. That's artificial, and secondary to producing the most informative articles.

--jh--

[augustfly]

Well, I was curious and here is my running tally.

No Titles

1. AAS Journals
2. MNRAS
3. A&A
4. Astronomy and Space Sciences (Springer)
5. PASP
6. Astron.Nachr.

Titles

1. Frontiers of Astro
2. Icarus (Elsevier)
3. JQRST (Elsevier)
4. Phys Rev D
5. GRL (and all the JGR's / AGU ones too)