Wolfgang Engelmann wrote:
I would like to use journal abbreviations in my reference list. I know, Jabref
is having this option (manage journal abbreviations); I have, however,
difficulties in getting it to work. Could somebody who used it already give
me a hint? The explanation in jabref is beyond me (e.g. personal Journal
list, external files, where and how to insert the journal list from JabRef)
There are actually 2 tasks:
- use abbreviations
- make sure the various kinds of writing of the same journal end up in the
same abbreviation
e.g.:
citation 1 uses AJP
citation 2 uses AJP
citation 3 Am.J.Phys.
citation 4 Am. J. Phys. (space!)
citation 5 Am. J. Physiol.
citation 6 Am. J. Physiology
citation 7 American Journal of Physiology
should all have finally
Am. J. Physiol.
It would be nice to mark the citations in my Jabref file who use the same
journal and tell jabref to put the correct abbreviation to all those. I have
the feeling, this is implemented in Jabref, but can't get it to work.
You could do something like that with the personal journal list, but it
would involve adding one line to your new personal list for each version
of each journal's name appearing in your .bib file, e.g.
AJP -> Am. J. Phys.
Am.J.Phys. -> Am. J. Phys.
American Journal of Physiology -> Am. J. Phys.
etc.
(assuming Am. J. Phys. was the abbreviation you wanted BibTeX to use).
Assuming you only have one .bib file, it might be easier to use the
string editor (Ctrl-T or BibTeX > Edit Strings) to add one abbreviation
for each journal (e.g., AJP -> Am. J. Phys., again assuming the right
side is how you want it listed). Then just manually edit each entry,
replacing whatever is in the journal field with #AJP#. The biggest
limitation of this approach is that the strings only apply to the .bib
file containing them, although I suspect it is not hard to transfer them
to a new .bib file.
/Paul
