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I am puzzled why I do not get the same style for entries of books and articles in the bibliography in the following MWE:

% !TeX program=lualatex
\documentclass{scrartcl}

\usepackage{fontspec}

\usepackage[style=numeric,url=false]{biblatex}
\AtEveryBibitem{\clearfield{month}}

\usepackage[main=ngerman,english]{babel}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
    @Article{atkins1980,
        author  = {Atkins, M},
        title   = {Atlas of continuous cooling transformation diagrams for engineering steels},
        journal = {American Society for Metals},
        year    = {1980},
        pages   = {260},
    }
    @Book{aaronson2010,
        title     = {Mechanisms of Diffusional Phase Transformations in Metals and Alloys},
        publisher = {{CRC} Press},
        year      = {2010},
        author    = {Hubert Aaronson and Masato Enomoto and Jong Lee},
        month     = {may},
        doi       = {10.1201/b15829},
    }
    @Article{kolmogorov1937,
        author  = {Kolmogorov, Andrei Nikolaevich},
        title   = {On the statistical theory of the crystallization of metals},
        journal = {Bull. Acad. Sci. USSR, Math. Ser},
        year    = {1937},
        volume  = {1},
        pages   = {355--359},
    }
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
    \cite{atkins1980,aaronson2010,kolmogorov1937}
    \printbibliography

\end{document}

enter image description here

Edit: As @moewe explained, there's a good reason for the enquoted upface vs. non-enquoted italic titles, though it makes for an inconsistent look of the bibliography and it's not the style I was recommended to use (which was what I aimed for in the original question). Upon a quick browse of some textbooks from my field, I have not found the enquoted title style for books a lot, let alone in German books. Taking all this into account, I'd like to apply the following minor changes to the default:

  • The title of sources that belong to a container should not be in quotes
  • The year should be consistently in parentheses
  • The first names should be abbreviated
  • : instead of '.' between author and title

What do I need to specify as package options and what do I have to adjust by hand in the bibtex entries?

Christoph90
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    Could you be more specific as to which aspects you would like to see done equally between the two entrytypes? (title emphasis etc). The two cannot be literally be equal, for their parts differ by necessity (eg. journaltitle, volume, number). – gusbrs Mar 01 '18 at 11:25
  • Furthermore, the article entries you supply as output to serve as examples of what you want are not exactly like your book one above (eg. the colon after the authors' names). And besides providing a MWE, which is good of course, you do not seem to have attempted any of the desired changes, for which there are many examples in this site. So, as far as I understand, your question very much reads "here is the output of some sample entries, please do-it-for-me". – gusbrs Mar 01 '18 at 11:36
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    While the differences may seem arbitrary to you, there is a method in the madness so to speak. If you hold a book or bound copy of a journal you will find that the titles marked in the bibliography with italics can be read on the cover or spine without even opening the book. The titles in quotation marks can only be found after opening the book or journal in the table of contents or in the article itself. I suspect this all comes from a time where people would go to libraries and obtain physical copies of the works they cite. ... – moewe Mar 01 '18 at 11:46
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    ... It makes sense to mark up the title you have to look for in the bookshelves and library catalogues differently from the titles you have to look for within a book. I am not particularly fond of the MLA style, but their concept of 'containers' is pretty much a extension of this idea https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/. – moewe Mar 01 '18 at 11:47
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    The main point to take away from this discussion is that bibliographic styles are highly conventional, in the sense that they follow typographic stylistic conventions which were often conceived of a long time ago. (Aside: Nowadays, a lot of journals have completely abolished all italics in bib entries, and they often don't put quotation marks around titles either.) An enormous advantage of biblatex (and bibtex) is that authors rarely need concern themselves with the particulars of typographic conventions -- they can (and should) gladly leave these niceties to journal and book publishers. – Mico Mar 01 '18 at 11:56
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    @gusbrs: I do think it's easier to describe what I'm looking for by an example than describing it in an abundance of words. I am certainly aware that my examples are not exactly like the book output. Will edit the question later. Note that before skipping through the 92 pages of texdoc biblatex on my own, I'd like to understand why there is a such a big difference for books and articles in the first place. – Christoph90 Mar 01 '18 at 12:32
  • @moewe: Thank you for the link, this clears things up a little. Though, for example, I do not see at all why biblatex does by default sometimes print the year in parentheses and sometimes not. – Christoph90 Mar 01 '18 at 12:39
  • Again, this is a convention followed by many (not all styles, but the Chicago Manual of Style, Nature style for example place years for @articles in parentheses). I guess it comes from the fact that for @articles the volume is much more important, and given a volume the year is almost redundant. For @books and friends, however, volume plays a different role (if at all) and the year is more important than for @article. – moewe Mar 01 '18 at 12:49
  • Please remember that biblatex's standard styles do not follow a particular style guide. I assume it is fair to say that the styles were influenced by (BibTeX) bibliography styles out there at the time and the tastes of the author. We can't really say why a particular decision was taken and Philipp Lehman has unfortunately vanished from the TeX world, so we can't ask him either. I believe that question about they whys of design decisions are off topic here anyway. – moewe Mar 01 '18 at 12:54
  • I've updated the question taking your first two comments into account. As I'm relatively new to TeX, I chose biblatex since I considered it a simple all-in-one solution. Let's drop the questions of why specific choises were made then :) – Christoph90 Mar 01 '18 at 13:02
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    Please consider asking only one question per question in the future. The four things you would like to change can easily be separated into four questions (you will find that almost all of them have been answered already on this site). See https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7425/35864 for why it is a good idea not too ask to many things in one question. – moewe Mar 01 '18 at 13:14
  • I will. Please consider linking the already existing answers to my questions if you actually have them at hand! There's a ton of answers concerning the parentheses around the year in the text or how to remove them altogether, among which I could not find an answer to my question. I added the other questions more in a "while I'm already at it" attitude and admittedly, these have indeed been answered elsewere. – Christoph90 Mar 01 '18 at 17:59
  • @moewe As a newbie, I have the pretty same interrogations as Christoph90 and I am disappointed to not find a more developed answer here (why setting parentheses, quotes here and there?). Thank you for your consideration – Rémy Hosseinkhan Boucher Nov 29 '20 at 16:12
  • @RémyHosseinkhanBoucher If some of your questions are not adequately addressed here, I suggest you just ask new ones. (Of course you can link back to this one to provide context.) As mentioned above and in https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7425/35864 it is a good idea to split up independent/orthogonal subquestions into questions of their own. All I'd like to comment for now (apart from what I already said before) is that the biblatex standard styles are just one particular style and there is no expectation that they work for everyone. ... – moewe Nov 30 '20 at 07:09
  • ... They probably work well for many people, especially if they have no string feelings about the exact style of their bibliography. But the point of biblatex is to make it easy for people to change the styles. It is hard to answer the 'why' questions conclusively given that the original biblatex developer (who wrote the standard styles) is no longer active. So any answers you get about that are going to be either lucky finds of some quotes where he explains his choices or quite a bit of speculation. – moewe Nov 30 '20 at 07:13
  • @moewe thank you for your consideration. It makes more sense now. Have a good day! – Rémy Hosseinkhan Boucher Dec 04 '20 at 12:58

1 Answers1

4

The code should be almost self-explanatory.

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage[main=ngerman,english]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=numeric,url=false,giveninits=true]{biblatex}
\AtEveryBibitem{\clearfield{month}}

\DeclareDelimFormat[bib,biblist]{nametitledelim}{\addcolon\space}

\DeclareFieldFormat
  [article,inbook,incollection,inproceedings,patent,thesis,unpublished]
  {title}{#1\isdot}

\DeclareFieldFormat{date}{\mkbibparens{#1}}
\DeclareFieldFormat[article,periodical]{date}{#1}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
    @Article{atkins1980,
        author  = {Atkins, M.},
        title   = {Atlas of continuous cooling transformation diagrams for engineering steels},
        journal = {American Society for Metals},
        year    = {1980},
        pages   = {260},
    }
    @Book{aaronson2010,
        title     = {Mechanisms of Diffusional Phase Transformations in Metals and Alloys},
        publisher = {{CRC} Press},
        year      = {2010},
        author    = {Hubert Aaronson and Masato Enomoto and Jong Lee},
        month     = {may},
        doi       = {10.1201/b15829},
    }
    @Article{kolmogorov1937,
        author  = {Kolmogorov, Andrei Nikolaevich},
        title   = {On the statistical theory of the crystallization of metals},
        journal = {Bull. Acad. Sci. USSR, Math. Ser},
        year    = {1937},
        volume  = {1},
        pages   = {355--359},
    }
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
  \cite{atkins1980,aaronson2010,kolmogorov1937}
  \printbibliography
\end{document}
moewe
  • 175,683