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When using the alpha bibliography style, the page numbers are listed differently in inproceedings and article: While article just lists the page numbers, inproceedings writes "pages...". How can I make both handle page numbers the same way (optimally, both should just omit the word "pages" like in article).

An example: enter image description here

Where the bib file is:

@inproceedings{salam,
  author       = {Salam, Abdus},
  editor       = {Svartholm, Nils},
  title        = {Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions},
  date         = {1968},
  location     = {Stockholm},
  pages        = {367-377},
}

@article{morris1984early,
  title={An early program proof by Alan Turing},
  author={Morris, F Lockwood and Jones, Cliff B},
  journal={Annals of the History of Computing},
  volume={6},
  number={2},
  pages={139--143},
  year={1984},
  publisher={IEEE}
}

And the tex file for reproduction of this problem: \documentclass[english]{article}

\usepackage{natbib}

\begin{document}
test
\cite{morris1984early}
\cite{salam}
\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{mybib}


\end{document}
Mico
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  • I daresay that the supposed inconsistency in the treatment of the contents of the pages field across two entry types -- @article and @inproceedings -- is neither a problem nor something worth fixing (say, by modifying the code in the inproceedings function in the file alpha.bst). To the contrary, there's an excellent reason for why the inproceedings function prefixes the string "pages" to the pages field: to resolve ambiguity over what the numbers might mean. For instances, for entries of types @inproceedings, one might also find information about chapters and volume numbers. – Mico Mar 24 '21 at 07:54
  • To really get the bibliography right, you could start by encasing the substring "Alan Turing" in a pair of curly braces, to prevent BibTeX from changing it to "alan turing". (Check out your screenshot to see what I'm talking about.) Another place where an immediate improvement might be noticed by your readers is if you provided the currently missing field booktitle = {Elementary Particle Physics} in the salam entry. Observe that in your screenshot, the editor isn't shown because the entry is currently lacking the booktitle field. Finally, do change location to address. – Mico Mar 24 '21 at 08:14
  • Related answer by Mico: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/113691/remove-pp-from-references-produced-by-chicago-style-re-position-page-numbers. But this behavior is standard, journal articles get the volume(number):firstpage-lastpage syntax while other entry types use the string pages or pp.. You will find this in other published papers that use natbib (i.e., a lot of published papers), so you will be in good company when you keep the defaults. – Marijn Mar 24 '21 at 10:19

0 Answers0