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My problem is the following: I use Mendeley to organize my literature. Conveniently, Mendeley is able to generate BibTex files of my groups, which I reference in my LaTeX document. This allows me to easily add a source to my reference manager, go back to my document and basically cite them immediately.

Now, I added a new source which is a newspaper article. Unfortunately, if I choose "Type: Newspaper Article" in Mendeley, the manager creates a Bibtex entry that looks as follows:

@misc{Doe2019,
    author = {Doe, Jane},
    booktitle = {NewspaperX},
    title = {{Hello There!}},
    year = {2019}
}

This is the Mendeley Default output and it can't be changed!

This does not include the day or month I could enter in the manager, which is... not good. But, okay. More importantly, if I use Biblatex and bibstyle=authoryear, not even the Newspaper name (booktitle) appears in the bibliography. Here a MWE:

\documentclass[a4paper, 12pt]{article}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents*}{example.bib}
    @misc{Doe2019,
        author = {Doe, Jane},
        booktitle = {NewspaperX},
        title = {{Hello There!}},
        year = {2019}
    }
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage[backend=biber,citestyle=authoryear-icomp,bibstyle=authoryear,uniquename=false]{biblatex}
\bibliography{example.bib}

\begin{document}
    This is my example \parencite[][]{Doe2019}.
    \printbibliography
\end{document}

Now, here are my questions:

  • Is it possible to add the newpaper name to the bibliography by changing the LaTeX-file
  • What would be a suitable workaround? Loading two .bib files, where one includes a correct bibtex entry? Abandonding Mendeley because there are more convenient tools out there?

Edit: Using the Type "Journal Article" in Mendeley at least solves the problem to a certain extent.

ManuNeu
  • 13
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    Why not using the @article entry type instead of @misc? After all they are in "periodical" publications. Also, biblatex would allow you to define your own entry types (though, not sure they are supported by Mendeley) – Guido Jun 14 '19 at 08:38
  • Replace @misc by @article andbooktitle by journal is not a solution? – Fran Jun 14 '19 at 08:38
  • The problem is that everything that I change in the .bib file is overwritten as soon as Mendeley synchronizes the file. – ManuNeu Jun 14 '19 at 08:54
  • For many reasons, hardly any automatic collected bibliography can be used "as is", so do not worry about until you have the really, really, really definitive .bib and then make manually the changes as needed. To move problematic entries to a fixed .bib and maintain the rest updatable in Mendeley could be also a solution, but imho is not the most efficient work flow. – Fran Jun 14 '19 at 10:14
  • You can chose @article type in Mendeley. – Guido Jun 14 '19 at 11:25
  • Wow. Duplicat? Thanks! It's always as if I'm told to be a total idiot. Please note that the question does not address the problem I have with my workflow.

    So better be done with this: I went through your comments and was in touch with the Mendeley support. Apparently @Fran is right. There seems no possibility to keep this workflow since Mendeley does not offer any changes in how it creates bibtex entries. This means that there seems no other way but to create a static `.bib´ file and edit it manually. It's a shame that Mendeley fails at this task.

     – ManuNeu Jun 14 '19 at 12:30
  • So thanks Fran and thanks to Guido as well. Simply using Journal Article would have worked as well (to a certain degree). – ManuNeu Jun 14 '19 at 12:32
  • Mendeley isn't exactly known for its high-quality .bib output (especially when it comes to using the fancy features biblatex offers), it doesn't help that Mendeley isn't particularly flexible and customisable in that area. (I don't use Mendeley or any other reference manager, but you may want to look into Zotero, together with https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/ it gives you quite a lot of control over the exported .bib, it is open source and has not only developers who get back to you quickly, but also a support forum.) – moewe Jun 18 '19 at 07:15
  • To be fair though, the standard biblatex styles don't have anything fancy set up for newspaper articles other than the usual @article type that is also used for academic journals. In practice there are often differences between newspaper and journal articles and one may want to address those differences in the citations or bibliography. If you wanted to do that, you'd have to do some adjustments. For the occasional newspaper article, you can probably get by using @article if you are flexible. – moewe Jun 18 '19 at 07:20
  • To some extent it is possible to 'repair' the problematic .bib input produced by Mendeley via Biber sourcemaps. See for example https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/422563/35864, https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/429297/35864. But there would have to be enough info in the entry left that there is a unique way to determine what to do with it. In theory you could remap all @miscs with a non-empty booktitle to @article and fill journaltitle with booktitle. But you might get in trouble if Mendeley exports other things as @misc with booktitle as well... – moewe Jun 18 '19 at 07:23
  • Thank you @moewe! This was very insightful! Unfortunately it seems to highlight even more the problem with Mendeley. As soon as my project is done, I might switch to Zotero and the "better-bibtex" resource. Thanks again :) – ManuNeu Jul 03 '19 at 15:03

0 Answers0