inbook not handled correctly

[timmli]

Bibentries of type inbook are not handled correctly. Say I have the following entry:

@inbook{wals-87,
    address = {Leipzig},
    author = {Matthew S. Dryer},
    booktitle = {The World Atlas of Language Structures Online},
    editor = {Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath},
    publisher = {Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology},
    title = {Order of adjective and noun},
    url = {http://wals.info/chapter/87},
    year = {2013}
}

This will be oddly typeset as

Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Order of adjective and noun. In. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.). Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals. info/chapter/87.

Sure, I could just change the entry type, but this makes the whole thing unnecessarily error-prone. I cannot see why inbook shouldn't be simply treated the same as incollection. Therefore, what I usually do is tell Biblatex to do so:

\DeclareBibliographyAlias{inbook}{incollection}

Maybe it would be a good idea to include this in the style files already?

[fintelkai]

Sounds reasonable. We'd accept a PR along those lines.

[adamliter]

This is a bit belated, but, for what it's worth, this isn't exactly in line with the semantics that the @inbook entry type has. To quote from the Biblatex manual:

Use the @inbook entry type for a self-contained part of a book with its own title only. It relates to @book just like @incollection relates to @collection. (p. 31)

And, furthermore @collection is described as:

A single-volume collection with multiple, self-contained contributions by distinct authors which have their own title. The work as a whole has no overall author but it will usually have an editor. (p. 8)

Compare this to how @book is described:

A single-volume book with one or more authors where the authors share credit for the work as a whole. (p. 7)

Given that WALS online is described as "a separate publication, edited by Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin", where each chapter has different authors, it seems like it should just be in the database as an @incolletcion entry, not an @inbook entry. (I'm not sure why @timmli was opposed to changing the entry type?)

I suppose there's no serious harm in aliasing @inbook to @incollection, and it might be convenient, but it could also promote confusion about the particular semantics of @inbook. I'm not sure that I have a strong opinion either way, but I thought I'd point this out to see if anyone else does.

(CC: @chbrown)

[chbrown]

No, it's not the most proper/accurate solution, but I have run into the same problem as timmli, where @inbook seemed more appropriate than @incollection, but I switched to @incollection because it looked better.

And in the company of \DeclareBibliographyAlias{collection}{book} and \DeclareBibliographyAlias{incollection}{inproceedings}, this alias doesn't seem to fall too far afield, hack-wise.

[adamliter]

@chbrown Fair enough, that makes sense. 😄

[fintelkai]

I agree with @chbrown. This is not a matter where biblatex-sp-unified should innovate something that goes beyond the Unified Style Sheet. If there should be a differentiated treatment of @inbook and @incollection, then this should be taken to the discussion of the USLv2 (https://github.com/lx-unified-v2/lx-unified-v2).

[kopeckyf]

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure whether it's ideal to alias inbook and incollection. They diverge in the roles of editor vs. bookauthor. An @inbook entry can have a bookauthor who is not the editor of the book. These cases are rare, and I didn't find treatment of them in Unified. One could resort to using @misc for these rare cases, but I think it would be cleaner to have separate entry types for them. There's a definition in standard.bbx one could import and adjust.

Best wishes, Felix

[fintelkai]

Thanks, could you propose how an @inbook entry should be styled that is consistent with the Unified principles? Especially for a case with both a bookauthor and an editor. Coding it would then be easy enough.

[kopeckyf]

@fintelkai the usage of @inbook that I saw contained only a bookauthor and an author, but not an editor. In this particular instance it would not have made sense to include the editor information, so from this case I'm thinking that there is always either an author or an editor for @inbook – but I'm not sure!

Anyway, this is how I formatted the entry which I think is in the spirit of Unified (it's an unusual, ancient source relevant to the study of Mauritian Creole):

@inbook{Chrestien1818,
    author = {Chrestien, François},
    year = {1818},
    title = {Le lièvre et la tortue},
    booktitle = {Voyage autour du monde},
    publisher = {Pillet Aîné},
    bookauthor = {de Freycinet, Louis},
    location = {Paris},
    pages = {411--412}
}