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I am quite new to the research wolds in Mathematics. Apparently, a lot of researchers use the database of MathSciNet (American Mathematical Society) to find bibliography entries, to then be used in LaTeX. I have done the same in the last year; the entries are updated, the quality of the information is high, and with the useful pro that the capital letters are "protected" by the curly brackets, so that they are not changed in the displayed version of the pdf.

However, I have noted that there is a mistake in all the titles of the papers in the database. Specifically, every en dash "–", used between consecutive surnames of distinct people (like Hopf–Galois), is replaced with an hyphen "-". While one may think that it is not a huge mistake, I feel like it is not really so different to replacing all the commas in the titles with semicolon.

I do not really know how to proceed. Specifically:

  1. Should I just leave it like this, so when I download a citation for LaTeX, just use it with the hyphen?
  2. Should I change manually the entry? I don't really like to change entries, and it may be time-consuming.
  3. Do you use different databases to get the entries? One idea is to use the entries directly in the page of the journal in which the article is published. There you do not have the "en dash problem", but the curly brackets to protect capital letters are missing, so still you should change manually part of the bibliography...
Lios
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  • If you use BibLaTeX then hyphens are automatically normalized into dashes, see for example https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/414727/biblatex-endash-instead-of-hyphen-in-page-ranges. – Marijn Aug 26 '22 at 14:55
  • In the citations in MSN database the range between the dates is correctly an en dash, symbol used: "--" – Lios Aug 26 '22 at 14:58
  • Ah I see, I didn't read carefully but indeed you specifically mention hyphens in paper titles. In that case https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/44783/how-to-replace-a-hyphen-with-an-en-dash-automatically is related, note that it warns against automatic replacement but you mention manual replacement which of course has the advantage that you can prevent unwanted substitutions. – Marijn Aug 26 '22 at 15:06
  • In any case, downloaded references are often messy (not just from MSN but from other databases as well), so editing them manually is a normal (and often necessary) thing to do. It may take a bit of time but unless you have hundreds of distinct references for each of your papers it will probably be quite manageable time-wise. – Marijn Aug 26 '22 at 15:09
  • So you suggest to change manually the entries for the en dash, then. Thank you! – Lios Aug 29 '22 at 10:24

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