Note printed in wrong place

[juhaszp95]

Hi There,

I would like to add a note to an @article entry, saying that it was reprinted somewhere else. I put this information into the note field in the .bib file, but it strangely gets printed between the volume number and the page number. like "Phys. Rev. A 11, blabla, 23 (1967)" (for volume number 11, page number 23, note "blabla", year 1967). I think this is a bug, not a feature. I would like the note to be printed after the citation, like "Phys. Rev. 11, 23 (1967). blabla".

While I see no updates have been published to the package in some time (maybe as there was no need), I do wonder if this could be fixed?

[josephwright]

The current setup stays close to the biblatex core where there's no strong reason to change, and here I didn't have a particular reason to move where notes are printed. The biblatex standard setup is:

  \usebibmacro{note+pages}%

and in biblatex-phys it is unchanged other than being wrapped inside a potential hyperlink. I'll talk to the core biblatex devs about this before making a change in the release code: I'd like to understand their thinking on semantics.

[josephwright]

@moewew Could you comment here about the core design?

[moewew]

The classical BibTeX styles have note at the very end of the entry.

I'm pretty sure note has been with biblatex from the start and was likely added by PL, so I don't think we can give any insight into why exactly the current place in the driver was chosen. So here are some observations and speculation.

note is a bit of a mixed bag contents wise

Miscellaneous bibliographic data which does not fit into any other field.
The note field may be used to record bibliographic data in a free format.

So logically it could go pretty much anywhere. In most drivers it comes just before the "publisher location date" block, which usually concludes the bibliographic data. This makes sense for the example content of the note field given in the manual

Publication facts such as “Reprint of the edition London 1831” are typical candidates for the note field.

Though I could just as well see it directly after the "publisher location date" block.

Anyway, I guess there is some consistency here in terms of note placement.

• For entry types that have a pages field, the pages output comes after the "publisher location date" block. In particular the note comes before the pages field.

• @article doesn't have a "publisher location date" block, but it does have a pages field. One could argue that it would only be consistent to have the note appear before the pages also for @article. This might explain the positioning here. It might also explain the (at least to my mind) pretty odd choice of lumping note and pages into one bibmacro.

Not sure if that helps a lot. I personally think that note+pages is an odd bibliography macro combo (semantically). Not only that: I also think that the placement of note in article is a bit odd. I don't think core biblatex can change it now, though.

---

For info that should come after all other bibliographic data there is always addendum, which is almost at the very end.

Reprint information can pretty elegantly be dealt with with the related feature.

[juhaszp95]

Many thanks for the comments. I wasn't aware of biblatex's related feature, which is very useful.

For anyone else interested, I could achieve what I wanted using the following .bib file structure:

@article{key1,
	...
	related = {key2},
	relatedstring = {reprinted in}
}

@book{key2,
	...
}

Which, when key1 is cited, will print article key1 in the bibliography, also saying that it was reprinted in book key2.

I still think that the note field placement is odd for the @article case, but this solves my immediate problem -- thanks very much again.

[juhaszp95]

Further to this question, on a similar note: I'm also putting erratum in the same bibliographic entry, using the related feature just discovered. While this now appears at the right place, its formatting is perhaps not according to the APS style: The title of the erratum is printed (which is just "Erratum: original title [original publication]"), and the journal of the erratum is also printed (which is of course the same journal where the original paper appeared). I think the PRL style guide in this case says the journal should not be printed again - perhaps this could be fine tuned (but this does not seem a major issue).

[juhaszp95]

I've now had time to check the behaviour of biblatex-phys vs RevTeX for the placement of notes, and I can confirm that RevTeX definitely places them after the year, not before (i.e. essentially at the very end of the bibliography entry).