Babel(spanish)/chicago bibliography style conflicting

Question

I am writing some class notes, and babel (with spanish language option) + natbib + chicago bibliography style are producing some undesirable results: they give me the Missing \endcsname inserted. error when I add a volume to a given article I am trying to cite. The class notes are in spanish so I need babel. A minimal working example of my tex file:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{natbib}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\title{min}
\author{none}
\date{today}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
cite the citation \citep{efron1979}
\bibliographystyle{chicago}
\bibliography{biblio.bib}
\end{document}

and my biblio.bib file:

@article{efron1979,
 author={Bradley Efron},
 title={Bootstrap Methods: Another Look at the Jackknife},
 journal={The Annals of Statistics},
 year=1979,
 number=1,
 pages={1-26},
 volume={7}
}

If I remove the volume from the cited work in the .bib file, for some reason, the code works. But these is a very annoying work around: I still get warnings from BibTex, saying that I have a missing volume. What is the proper solution to this?

I can reproduce the error you've encountered. Until a longer-term fix is found, can you switch to a different bibliography style? — Mico, Jan 19 '22 at 05:16
Does this answer your question? How to use non-breaking space (~) with \usepackage[spanish]{babel}? — KersouMan, Jan 19 '22 at 07:20
An alternative would be to use the biblatex-chicago package to print your bibliography — KersouMan, Jan 19 '22 at 07:40

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 19 '22 at 09:39

Given that you use utf8 encoding (notice that this is the default since a while; you do not need to explicitly load inputenc here, although you probably do need the fontenc to set T1), probably you will input ñ as ñ and not as ~n --- one possibility is to disable the shorthands altogether, as in:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % not needed
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % this IS needed
\usepackage{natbib}
\usepackage[spanish, es-noshorthands, shorthands=off]{babel}
\title{min}
\author{none}
\date{today}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
cite the citation \citep{efron1979}
\bibliographystyle{chicago}
\bibliography{biblio.bib}
\end{document}

which works. If you have Spanish shorthands in the real bib file, though, that will be more complex --- but in BiBTeX file I advocate for plain TeX syntax everywhere, so you have no surprises...

Disabling the babel shorthands when using spanish will prevent also several other glitches with, for example, TikZ and company.

This fixed the issue, thanks a lot! – Alejandro Calle Jan 19 '22 at 18:41 — Alejandro Calle, Jan 19 '22 at 18:41

Babel(spanish)/chicago bibliography style conflicting

1 Answers1