Decision needed on Bibliography Style - please help me with this

[alxlo]

ADR XYZ

Context

The iSAQB curricula (Foundation Level, Advanced Level) and related documents (iSAQB Glossary, exam preparation materials) currently use inconsistent bibliography styles. Various styles and formats are mixed, making maintenance difficult and potentially confusing readers. This affects readability and synchronization between different iSAQB documents.

Decision

Here it gets difficult. For the citation keys [Bass+ YYYY] etc I do have a very clear idea what to use, but not for the actual reference entry. I found no convincing arguments for either IEEE, APA, Chicago, whatever. We should decide on a widely used standard, and to my surprise, IEEE Style is less common in technical writing than I thought, but I like the (relative) brevity. We also have to consider rules for edge cases (downloads,, WIkipedia articles, ...)

I would like it to be brief, concise and easy to use.

Here are some examples according to https://pitt.libguides.com/citationhelp

APA Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Books.

MLA Card, Claudia. The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. Oxford UP, 2005.

Chicago Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.

IEEE D. Sarunyagate, Ed., Lasers. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Personally I don't like the whole last name, komma, first name thing as this leads to a long and hard to read authors list, so i tend to use IEEE as it also provides guidance on a huge set of edge cases.

Please provide some feedback on this and I will create ADRs, both for the reference and the citation key/label.

Whether we implement this decision now or just use it as guidance for incremental improvements is up to the inner Monk of the people working on the Curriculum and the Glossary. But I really would like to have some guidance here as I definitely will have to synchronize references across different documents.

[alxlo]

And by the way,...

Alternative: Current Mixed Style (rejected)

• Pro: No conversion effort needed
• Con: Different formats across iSAQB documents
• Con: No clear rules for consistency

[alxlo]

Concerning the citation keys, there is now a pull request https://github.com/isaqb-org/curriculum-foundation/pull/672

I think this should be handled separately from the style for the reference entry (at least that's what i think the part after the citation key is called)

[alxlo]

Here is a more easy to compare example:

IEEE

L. Bass, P. Clements, and R. Kazman, Software architecture in practice. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2022.

APA

Bass, L., Clements, P., & Kazman, R. (2022). Software architecture in practice. Addison-Wesley.

Chicago

Bass, Len, Paul Clements, and Rick Kazman. Software Architecture in Practice. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2022.

MLA

Bass, Len, et al. Software Architecture in Practice. Addison-Wesley, 2022.

While IEEE is not the shortest, what really makes the other styles less user friendly is the confusing handling of author names. Generally I like having the comma as a clear separator between authors. That's why I would prefer IEEE.

Please, if you have no comments on this or this bureaucratic detail is of no importance to you, please indicate. Then I would like to continue writing an ADR proposing IEEE style as having to synchronize literature lists with different bibliography styles is really bothersome to me. Honestly I care less about the style chooses but about choosing any style at all.

[skogsbaer]

To me, consistency is important. I do not prefer a particular style. IEEE looks good to me.

[gernotstarke]

(you all know that this is a bikeshedding issue - but nevertheless I very much like the consistency we get when approving this...)

[ulibecker]

IEEE style looks good to me, agree with @alxlo's rationale