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I would like to address the community with the following general question. If you've ever needed to refer to some historical articles from the works of, say, J. C. Maxwell or A. Einstein, you may have come across these commonly cited ways of dating their works. The methods I have encountered are:

  • the date on which the finished article was delivered to the learned society (received year)
  • the date it was presented to the relevant learned society (read year)
  • the date on which it was officially published in print in the relevant volume (always with a delay of several weeks - typesetting, proofreading, printing,...) (publishing year)

Into what biblatex entry should have saved these dates.

For example, Maxwell often sent them out late in the year and they were not published until the following year. In addition, some large articles were published in continuation. How to proceed in this case when I need to print a range in the years e.g. 1855-56. On writing year = {1855-56} the compiler complains that it is not a number.

My question is, how to edit the biblatex file so that these dates can be printed and also distinguished in the reference list at the end of the document.

JardaFait
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  • Enter date ranges as date={date1/date2} (see table 3 of biblatex manual, texdoc biblatex). Start year and end year, and other date parts, will be calculated automatically. – Cicada Aug 15 '22 at 09:36

1 Answers1

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year = {1855-56},

won't sort properly, because biblatex expects an integer in the year field.

As suggested by Cicada in the comments, you could use the date field and ISO8601 formatting to give a date range

date = {1855/1856},

This will not cut it, though, if you really want to be able to properly distinguished between "date received", "date read" and "date published".

Classically year/date refers to the date of publishing (for published works like books or articles).

If you want to also give the date an article was first sent in/received or it was presented/read, the most semantic option is probably to define a new date field for that. Biblatex: Custom date fields shows how you could do that. You would then have to modify your style to also use these new date fields.

Unless you are writing on the history of science or need to explore priority of research in a very detailed way it is probably enough for your readers to just use the date published and be done with that. If the "publishing delay" is of great interest you probably mention it in the text explicitly (in which case it might not be needed in the bibliography, which ultimately is mean to enable your readers to find the relevant work themselves).

moewe
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