how to enter journal articles deviating from the traditional pages format

[siebenstreich]

I didn't find an answer on this elsewhere, so I hope opening this issue is ok.

There are modern electronic-only journals which deviate from the traditional pages format. Instead, the articles within the same volume get some identifier.
An example is the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. Let's look at this article. It is given as Volume 19, Issue 3 (2012), Paper #P18. In mathscinet it is given as Electron. J. Combin. 19 (2012), no. 3, Paper 18, 12 pp.

How should we add such references with biblatex?
Type should be article, I guess. The closest thing I can think of is pages = "#P18", pagetotal = "12 pp.". However, "#P18" might couse formatting problems at some places since it is not a page number or a page number range. And the field "pagetotal" is not supported by the type article, at the moment.

[moewew]

There is a field for @article entries called eid that can be used for the 'pseudo-pagination' of electronic journals. There is indeed no pagetotal for @articles, if the total number of pages is important, you could use the pages field.

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{betsumiya,
  author  = {Koichi Betsumiya and Masaaki Harada and Akihiro Munemasa},
  title   = {A complete classification of doubly even self-dual codes of length 40},
  journal = {The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics},
  volume  = {19},
  number  = {3},
  eid     = {P18},
  date    = {2012},
  pages   = {1-12},
}
@article{betsumiya:alt,
  author  = {Koichi Betsumiya and Masaaki Harada and Akihiro Munemasa},
  title   = {A complete classification of doubly even self-dual codes of length 40},
  journal = {The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics},
  volume  = {19},
  number  = {3},
  date    = {2012},
  pages   = {P18},
  pagination = {none},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}


\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson,betsumiya,betsumiya:alt}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Alternatively you can use pagination = {none}, and the pages field, but then you would have to give up the number of pages.

Related questions on TeX.SX: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/172190/35864, https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/230403/35864, https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/297002/35864

[siebenstreich]

Thank you for this detailed answer! I was not aware of the eid entry.

In the presence of the pagetotal field, using the pages field for the number of pages feels a bit like cheating. Is there a particular reason why there is no pagetotal for @Article? Would it make sense to add it?

[moewew]

Well I guess the idea was that @articles usually have a pages field from which one can (more or less easily) calculate the total number of pages. Compare this with @inbook and @incollection which also don't have pagetotal.

I'm not sure if it is a good idea to add pagetotal to @article now. For one, any change to the standard styles (especially for frequently used type such as @article) needs to be made carefully since they could disrupt people's style modifications. Secondly, and maybe more problematically, pagetotal is a common field that may be present in some @article entries already. If we now change the defaults to show the field, the output of existing documents may change not insignificantly.

Of course there is nothing stopping you from adding the field for your personal documents (https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/151752/35864), but I'm sceptical about adding it to standard.bbx.

[moewew]

7201185 adds a few more words about eid to the docs.

[siebenstreich]

Thank you!

I agree that a pagetotal for articles with a traditional page range is redundant and not necessary. For eid-articles, the situation is different. As mathscinet gives the pagetotal, I really think there should also be a clean way to add this information in biblatex, without abusing the pages field and without the need to manually modify style files. Do you really think that adding a pagetotal to @article would cause such a mess? pagetotal hasn't been around for too long IIRC.
An alternative would be to introduce some new type like @electronicarticle, but generally I think the number of types should better be kept small.

[moewew]

Do you really think that adding a pagetotal to @article would cause such a mess?

Honestly, I have no idea. I don't have statistics on people's .bib files and I don't know how many exporters export pagetotal for @article when it is unnecessary.

One of the (supposed) selling points of TeX (and LaTeX) is its stability: A TeX document compiled twenty years ago should look the same when I compile it today. As it turns out, absolute stability is incredibly hard to achieve if you want your system to move forward, improve and make use of and adapt to general developments in its surrounding ecosystem. Even the LaTeX kernel is being changed (very carefully, but still) again and moves forward (UTF-8 is now the standard encoding, ...).

biblatex certainly is a system that is still under active development and undergoing changes. But those changes are mainly concerned with the 'programming' or customisation layer of biblatex. The output of the unmodified standard styles should be fairly stable.

I can definitely see that the suggestion makes sense, but we have to keep in mind the possible consequences of such a change and weigh that against the benefits of the change. I personally don't think that having the total number of pages of an @article displayed in the bibliography is a big improvement. It may make sense for list of publications in CVs or for reading lists, but in your average bibliography the reader would probably not care much. On the other hand people often care about the length of their bibliography entries, adding this additional text may not be welcome. More importantly, as already mentioned people may already have pagetotal fields in their entries that are ignored and this change would change the output.

With requests like these I usually try to make the case to retain the status quo to show the 'opposite side' of the argument, regardless of whether I believe the change should be made or not.

An alternative would be to introduce some new type like @electronicarticle, but generally I think the number of types should better be kept small.

Yes, that would be an alternative, but not one I would seriously consider. @article works mostly fine for online @articles already.

[moewew]

@plk Any comments here?

1. Should we add eid to more entry types? (See dev...moewew:moreid) The rationale being that the number of online-only @proceedings and @incollections might increase where such a field is more appropriate than pages.
2. What about pagetotal? I'm not that fond of adding it to all kind of entries because I have seen it filled by exporters for @article and the like and I doubt many people will want to see it.

[plk]

I think the eid change makes sense but I agree about pagetotal - it's rarely used or useful.

[siebenstreich]

Wouldn't it be possible to display the pagetotal info only if no pages info is given? That would leave the rendering of the vast majority of @articles unchanged, but would add the info to those @articles which don't have a classical pagination.

[moewew]

Yup that would be an option. The question is how we would implement that with as little changes to standard.bbx as possible. We have to assume that people rely on the current state of the bibliography macros and the driver.

I would have added the eid in chapter+pages. If we want to add pagetotal for @articles we'd probably add it to note+pages. But then we should probably add pagetotal to all entries that allow for eid and that's where things get complicated: Some drivers already have a \printfield{pagetotal} after the call to \usebibmacro{chapter+pages}, so we can't add pagetotal to chapter+pages even though that would make sense.

[moewew]

Adding eid to chapter+pages should hopefully be safe. I could not find styles that would have issues with that (but I may well have missed some subtle problems that are hard to grep for).

For added safety we could implement an eid option similar to the doi option to let users turn off the eid if they don't like it per type.

---

Moving/adding pagetotal to chapter+pages would cause issues at least for

• biblatex-abnt
• biblatex-arthistory-bonn (@thesis driver)
• biblatex-bath (@report)
• biblatex-bookinarticle (@inthesis)
• biblatex-bookinother (@inthesis)
• biblatex-chem
• biblatex-dw
• biblatex-ieee
• biblatex-jura2
• biblatex-lni
• biblatex-musuos
• biblatex-philosophy
• biblatex-science
• biblatex-trad
• droit-fr
• dtk

even if many of these styles are more or less actively maintained and even if I have grossly overcounted styles, I think the number of styles we would potentially break is in no relation to the good that would come from adding pagetotal to chapter+pages.

We could think about adding \printfield{pagetotal} to the drivers directly, but then I would like to guard it with an option pagetotal (like the url option, we could even configure the option to retain backwards compatibility with the current output in that case). The option would break biblatex-iso690 and biblatex-dw, since they already define such an option. biblatex-iso690 could probably be changed relatively quickly, but I'm sceptical about biblatex-dw at the moment. I'd actually prefer to use a bibmacro instead of a bare \printfield{pagetitle} (that would clash with biblatex-ext, which is no problem). Even in that case I would still like an option.

[moewew]

Suggested changes to the standard styles are at #1000. Comments are welcome.

[spakin]

I'm just a "normal" user, not a style developer. I do, however, find myself increasingly frequently citing papers (most typically @article) that use nontraditional page numbering. My preference would be to use eid + pagetotal. I don't care much whether or not pagetotal is displayed in the absence of eid.

FYI, as a stopgap, I've sometimes used non-numbers in pages, as in pages = {98765:1--10}, to represent ID + page range.

[moewew]

@spakin Thank you very much for your feedback!

It's interesting to see that people are so fond of displaying the number of pages in the bibliography.

As I wrote above I'm concerned that adding pagetotal to the standard styles might result in (undesirable) changed output for some users (in particular those who use automatically generated .bib files that eagerly populate pagetotal), plus it is not entirely trivial to add pagetotal without affecting contributed styles. (A pagetotal option would be great, but a big issue for biblatex-dw.)

[spakin]

It's interesting to see that people are so fond of displaying the number of pages in the bibliography.

As I mentioned, I personally don't much care if pagetotal is displayed for bibliographic entries with proper starting and ending page numbers. One reason it's useful for other cases is that if I encounter an interesting-sounding article that I want to read, but it's buried in some obscure journal that's not available online or is available online but is locked behind a paywall, I might put forth the effort to get ahold of it if it's a full-length article but not if it turns out to be a one-page abstract or other short-form document. pagetotal gives me that information.