BibLaTeX puts too much information into my bibliography!

Question

I use a reference management software that puts a lot of extra information into my .bib files, for example:

@book{Marcuse1991_TheoryOfDielectric,
  title = {Theory of Dielectric Optical Waveguides},
  author = {Marcuse, Dietrich},
  date = {1991},
  edition = {2nd ed},
  publisher = {{Academic Press}},
  location = {{Boston}},
  editora = {American Telephone {and} Telegraph Company},
  editoratype = {collaborator},
  isbn = {978-0-12-470951-5},
  keywords = {Dielectrics,Fiber optics,Optical wave guides},
  note = {"Published by arrangement with AT\&T."},
  pagetotal = {380},
  series = {Quantum Electronics--Principles and Applications}
}

Naturally, biblatex goes ahead and dumps it all in my bibliography.

Needless to say, this is way too much information for a bibliography.

I guess workarounds would be to just remove all unwanted fields from my .bib file (although I like them there) or to make biblatex skip all unwanted fields with \AtEveryBibitem{\clearfield{...}}.

But is there a more elegant way? I would've assumed biblatex comes with pre-defined styles for exactly this, but I can't find such thing in its documentation.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 18 '21 at 06:26

biblatex has several pre-defined styles (alphabetic, numeric, authoryear, authortitle, verbose), but those are more concerned with how entries are cited in the text and how that should be represented in the bibliography and not so much with what data is shown in the bibliography: All the standard styles basically show all available data.

There are custom styles that may not show certain fields because it is not required for the style guide they implement (https://ctan.org/topic/biblatex).

In general I would say that you can get good output with a combination of

a well-curated .bib file (the example looks OK, but the note = {"Published by arrangement with AT\&T."}, is a bit fishy, I would definitely leave out the quotation marks, and I would probably drop the entire thing)
and biblatex features to suppress or modify the output of fields.

So I'm afraid unless you find a style in https://ctan.org/topic/biblatex that does exactly what you want, you will have to code up something yourself. This can either be a completely new style that leaves out the fields you don't want to see or it can be additional code that suppresses fields you don't want to see in existing styles. Usually the latter is easier to achieve. There are several different ways to suppress fields in biblatex. See for example Remove title in biblatex references, How to omit address field while using biblatex. Usually \AtEveryBibitem{\clearfield{...}} is the least elegant of those ways.

BibLaTeX puts too much information into my bibliography!

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