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I am using BibTeX and JabRef 2.10 and I would like to cite an ISO/IEC standard.

JabRef indicates that beside the key, the required fields for the entry type Standard are title, organization, and institution.

What is the difference between organization and institution? (And what do I have to put into which field?)

To me, these two fields sound like two different words for the same thing. And when reading this description of the BibTeX format, it says:

institution: The sponsoring institution of a technical report.

organization: The organization that sponsors a conference or that publishes a manual.

Which corroborates my impression that the two fields indicate the same piece of information - it is the entity that sponsors the work.

The only somewhat similar sounding question, How to cite a standard (ISO, etc.) in BibLaTeX?, does not mention the difference between these fields.

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O. R. Mapper
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    These two fields are indeed very similar. It somehow depends in your style and bibliography package which of the two (if at all) applies here. JabRef is just giving you guidance it cannot know how exactly it will be handled by your .bst/.bbx style. Just try how it looks yourself. In the post you link to, for example neither of the fields is used, there the type indicates the institution (ISO in that case). See also http://b-p-i.blogspot.de/2012/08/cite-iso-standard-bibtex.html. In standard biblatex, @standard will be aliased to @misc, which only supports organization. – moewe Aug 12 '15 at 10:05
  • a technical report is usually something with an official number. so iso would be an "institution". on the other hand, if the publication is from a conference, then "organization" would be more appropriate. that said, this is probably a more appropriate question for academia. – barbara beeton Oct 03 '15 at 21:25
  • @barbarabeeton: But if the publication is from a conference, its entry type wouldn't be "Standard", but "InProceedings" (and if it were a technical report, it would be "TechReport", anyway) ... I did consider asking this on Academia SE, but decided for LaTeX SE because of the very technical nature of the question (I'm not trying to find out what is usually identified as an "organization" or an "institution" in academic parlance, but what BibTeX tries to express by these terms). If more commenters suggest it is a better fit for Academia SE, I will ask an equivalent question there. – O. R. Mapper Oct 03 '15 at 21:35
  • @moewe: I did not answer at first as I wanted to wait for some more reaction, but well ... "It somehow depends in your style and bibliography package which of the two (if at all) applies here." - this statement seems to contradict a bit the idea that the BibTeX file is just the data storage that should be kept independently of the formatted output (in particular, that could be used across several documents that adhere to different styleguides); in short: the separation of data and representation. – O. R. Mapper Oct 03 '15 at 21:36
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    First of all, there is no type exclusively for standards in "standard BibTeX" as documented in btxdoc. biblatex lists an entry type standard under unsupported types. So if you start from the official point of view, you are dead in the water using a dedicated type, you need to use a different type such as @manual (technical documentation as per btxdoc), where organization applies; but then you could also use @techreport, where institution is the correct field, or @misc, where neither of the two is supported (in btxdoc, biblatex is fine with organization). – moewe Oct 04 '15 at 17:05
  • Then btxdoc also notes that "[s]ome nonstandard bibliography styles may ignore some optional fields", "no scheme with thirteen formats can do everything perfectly. Thus, you should feel free to be creative in how you use these entry types" and "Don't take the field names too seriously." (the latter two come under "Helpful Hints"). You will find some implementations of a @standard entry type for biblatex on the net. – moewe Oct 04 '15 at 17:13
  • I agree that in a perfect world your Platonic BibTeX standard would make every style work the same, in reality though, BibTeX and TeX as a whole are living organic systems, where sometimes a bit of creativity is asked of style authors because the standard does not say anything about needed fields and the like. Another example of mud in the water is the address confusion. And especially if there is no "standard way" of putting a work into your .bib file, you need to be careful and observe what your style does with your input. – moewe Oct 04 '15 at 17:18

1 Answers1

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The BibLaTeX manual version 3.15 makes a clearer distinction:

institution

The name of a university or some other institution, depending on the entry type. Traditional BibTeX uses the fieldname school for theses, which is supported as an alias.

organization

The organization(s) that published a @manual or an @online resource, or sponsored a conference.

homocomputeris
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  • I'm not sure this is much of a clarification. I guess it is if we primarily restrict an institution to an educational institution (biblatex only supports the institution field for the "report" and "thesis" entries, so this may not be so unreasonable). But, e.g., the merriam webster definition of institution is "an established organization or corporation (such as a bank or university) especially of a public character", which seems a bit more open-ended to me. – MattHusz Oct 16 '21 at 22:24