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How do you suggest to cite the European Union's recent General Data Protection Regulation?

I have looked at Citing EU regulations using BibTeX, but I would like a more specific advice.

  • More specific how? Right now this question is opinion-based. – Henri Menke Jun 17 '19 at 02:25
  • Okay, that's definitely opinion-based and also off-topic on this site. I've voted to close. – Henri Menke Jun 17 '19 at 02:28
  • @nbro The other question is more phrased towards "how can I cite this unusual document type" which is on-topic as it is of the form "how can I do X in LaTeX". Your question on the other hand asks specifically "I want an expert opinion on the proper way to do X" which is 1. opinion-based and 2. off-topic because not LaTeX-related (a plain text solution would also answer the question). It's true however that the other question is a bit borderline, it could be considered opinion-based as well. – Marijn Jun 17 '19 at 15:31
  • Laws, regulations, treaties, court decisions (and to some extent norms and standards) are tricky beasts for bibliography and citation styles as implemented in biblatex (and to some extent also BibTeX). They often don't conform to the simple "author-title-date" scheme and have their own identifiers and idiosyncrasies. The data present and the expected output can vary widely between law systems, countries and the type of source. That is probably one of the reasons (another would be lack of interest) why the biblatex standard styles don't do anything fancy for those types ... – moewe Jun 18 '19 at 06:54
  • ... they are known (@jurisdiction, @legislation, @legal, @standard), but they fall back to @misc by default. You can try to just use @legislation (which falls back to @misc) and be creative and flexible in your choice of fields until you like the result. For a one-off that is probably quickest. If you expect to cite more legal works you may want to look into writing your own driver for those types. In any case you need to have some idea of the output you find acceptable or desirable. Related: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/437824/35864 – moewe Jun 18 '19 at 06:58

1 Answers1

4

comparison of the citation and legislation types in the APA citation style

Since this reference does not belong to any of the typical types of bibliography entries, and since it has an online link, it is good to sort it under online; however, there are some citation styles that do have a Legislation entry type:

% gdpr.bib file
\begin{filecontents}[overwrite]{gdpr.bib}
@online{GDPR2016a,
  date       = {2016-05-04},
  location   = {OJ L 119, 4.5.2016, p. 1--88},
  title      = {Regulation ({EU}) 2016/679 of the {European} {Parliament} and of the {Council}},
  url        = {https://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj},
  titleaddon = {of 27 {April} 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing {Directive} 95/46/{EC} ({General} {Data} {Protection} {Regulation})},
  abstract   = {The General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679, "GDPR") is a Regulation in European Union (EU) law on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA).},
  author     = {{European Parliament} and {Council of the European Union}},
  keywords   = {access consumer data data-processing freedom gdpr information justice law personal privacy protection security verification},
  urldate    = {2023-04-13},
}

@Legislation{EuropeanParliament2016a,
  date       = {2016-05-04},
  location   = {OJ L 119, 4.5.2016, p. 1--88},
  title      = {Regulation ({EU}) 2016/679 of the {European} {Parliament} and of the {Council}},
  url        = {https://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj},
  titleaddon = {of 27 {April} 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing {Directive} 95/46/{EC} ({General} {Data} {Protection} {Regulation})},
  abstract   = {The General Data Protection Regulation (2016/679, "GDPR") is a Regulation in European Union (EU) law on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA).},
  author     = {{European Parliament} and {Council of the European Union}},
  keywords   = {access consumer data data-processing freedom gdpr information justice law personal privacy protection security verification},
  urldate    = {2023-04-13},
}
\end{filecontents}


% preamble
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}


% utf8
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}


% hyperref
\usepackage[x11names]{xcolor}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\hypersetup{citecolor=DodgerBlue3, urlcolor=Blue1, colorlinks=true}


% bibliography
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=apa]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{gdpr.bib}


% document info
\title{Citing the GDPR}
\author{Aldaoudeyeh, Al-Motasem and Garza, Rolando}
\date{\today}


\begin{document}


\maketitle


One could cite as \texttt{online} \parencite{GDPR2016a}, or as
\texttt{Legislation} \parencite{EuropeanParliament2016a};
however, the latter would only be available if the chosen citation
style has a driver for the \texttt{Legislation} type.


\printbibliography


\end{document}

If you wish to add a particular driver to your style, and use the available fields, you may add or customize different entry types.

rolandog
  • 3
Al-Motasem Aldaoudeyeh
  • 6,100
  • 4
    Note that this is just a fact sheet about the GDPR and not the regulation itself. You could think about upgrading the European Commission from organization to author here. It is not quite clear to me that the publication date of the leaflet is actually 2018-05-25 (the date at which the directive applies). – moewe Jun 17 '19 at 05:31
  • 2
    For the GDPR itself biblatexknows the types @legislation or @legal. The default styles handle those types as @misc (so the differences to @online are minute), but they are more true to the actual type of document and custom styles may be able to handle them with more care. The main problem with legal citations like this is often hard to jam them into the usual scheme of author name, title, year. That makes it especially complicated to find a good citation label (the [18] in an alphabetic style is meh and an author-year style would also have issues). – moewe Jun 17 '19 at 05:31