Publisher, location, and year in @inproceedings and @incollection.

[russella]

Dear Marco,

It seems that the way that bibtex/plain handles publisher data in @inproceedings and @incollection entries is inconsistent. Specifically, in @inproceedings, it keeps all the publisher data together, including address and year--so far, so good. But @incollection is very odd: if there is no address, the publisher and year are together after a period; if there IS an address, the year and the address are placed with the previous publication data. My guess is that this is a bug in the plain.bst. Consider the following four entries:

@incollection{kohayakawa2-a,
author={Y. Kohayakawa},
title={{Szemer'{e}di's} regularity lemma for sparse graphs},
booktitle={Foundations of Computational Mathematics},
editor={F. Cucker and M. Shub},
pages={216--230},
publisher={Springer},
year={1997}
}

@incollection{kohayakawa2-b,
author={Y. Kohayakawa},
title={{Szemer'{e}di's} regularity lemma for sparse graphs},
booktitle={Foundations of Computational Mathematics},
editor={F. Cucker and M. Shub},
pages={216--230},
address={Berlin},
publisher={Springer},
year={1997}
}

@inproceedings{kasher/approx-a,
author = {Kasher, Roy and Kempe, Julia},
title = {Two-source extractors secure against quantum adversaries},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Approximation,
and the 14th International conference on Randomization, and combinatorial
optimization: algorithms and techniques},
series = {APPROX/RANDOM'10},
year = {2010},
venue = {Barcelona, Spain},
pages = {656--669},
publisher = {Springer},
address = {Berlin}}

@inproceedings{kasher/approx-b,
author = {Kasher, Roy and Kempe, Julia},
title = {Two-source extractors secure against quantum adversaries},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Approximation,
and the 14th International conference on Randomization, and combinatorial
optimization: algorithms and techniques},
series = {APPROX/RANDOM'10},
year = {2010},
venue = {Barcelona, Spain},
pages = {656--669},
publisher = {Springer}
}

The only difference between the "-a" and "-b" entries of these is that the "-b" entry has a publisher address, while the "-a" entry does not. Now look at the way that bibtex/plain typesets these:

At the moment, biblatex/trad-plain does the right thing for @incollection (and has exactly the same behavior as plain). On the other hand, biblatex/trad-plain doesn't agree with bibltex/plain on @incollection.

In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to layout publisher data in @inproceedings in exactly the same way that you do for @incollection, even though this would be a little inconsistent with bibtex/plain (which seems to have some inconsistencies itself.)

[russella]

Hi Marco, It looks to me as though this is a bug in bibtex/plain, see:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/128556/bibtex-plain-consistency-mystery-with-inproceedings-entries

In particular, I think the year data should always go with the publisher; however, for inproceedings, it seems that location should not (which is irritating), since this is supposed to be the location of the conference...argh.