Malformed month in IWCS 2019 .bib files

[nschneid]

E.g. https://aclweb.org/anthology/papers/W/W19/W19-0405.bib has

month = "23{--}27 " # may,

[mbollmann]

That looks generally correct to me, except maybe for the brackets around the dash. may is a BibTeX macro and # is string concatenation.

EDIT: well, except that days shouldn't be in a "month" field to begin with... d'oh.

[nschneid]

I don't think the Zotero BibTeX parser recognizes this syntax (can't speak for other reference managers). Is this used in other Anthology .bib files?

[mbollmann]

Yes it is, see the discussion here: https://github.com/acl-org/acl-anthology/issues/94#issuecomment-451738779

[mbollmann]

FWIW, I tried importing this entry in Zotero and it shows the date as "23--27 05 2019", which seems like it generally handles it.

[akoehn]

I can't see any reference to days in #94, only to multi-month entries. I we wanted to have days in the bibtex entry, it should be in the day field, not the month one.

Edit: editing your comments is a bit like cheating, I didn't see your edit as it is not distributed through email, @mbollmann :-)

[nschneid]

FWIW, I tried importing this entry in Zotero and it shows the date as "23--27 05 2019", which seems like it generally handles it.

For me, Zotero imports it as "23–27 2019", missing the month entirely.

In any case, the date clearly shouldn't be listed under the month field.

[mbollmann]

For me, Zotero imports it as "23–27 2019", missing the month entirely.

I should have mentioned that I'm using Zotero with Better BibTeX, maybe that's the difference?

In any case, the date clearly shouldn't be listed under the month field.

Agreed. Since this is already recorded in the XML this way, I feel this is an issue with data ingestion. This particularly instance should be easy to fix, but maybe we want to make sure to check for this in the future. @mjpost?

[mjpost]

A few questions:

1. Is day actually a bibtex field?
2. How would one specify a conference date range, e.g., 30 June to 4 July?
3. What does Zotero do if you import an entry with a field like month = jan # "--" # feb?

I think we should fix the XML. Maybe

• month should be date, which can be a range
• when we export to bib, we only export the month

[mbollmann]

day is not a BibTeX field, and I think representing ranges is technically not supported at all in plain BibTeX.

BibLaTeX, on the other hand, supports date ranges with precision up to minutes, if desired, and can also distinguish between date of publication and date of event.

[nschneid]

What does Zotero do if you import an entry with a field like month = jan # "--" # feb?

For me it just imports January and ignores the rest of the line. Which I suppose is not the end of the world, if we really want to support localized month names.

If we're willing to assume English month names, any of the following will work as expected, though I realize date is nonstandard BibTeX:

• month = "January--February"
• month = "31 January--4 February"
• date = "31 January--4 February, 2019"

However, combining date with month or year is problematic. Exporting any of these back to BibTeX produces month = feb.

[mjpost]

I agree we should get rid of dates in this field, but Zotero’s failure to parse jan # “—“ # feb seems like a Zotero bug.