Improving Compatibility Of Bibtex Styles For Corporate Authors

Standardizing Corporate Author Formatting

The lack of consistent formatting for corporate authors in BibTeX entries has led to significant compatibility issues when citing organizations across different journals and publishers. Because each publication venue has their own standards for handling corporate author names, attempts to reference the same organization can lead to very different BibTeX metadata depending on the chosen style.

For example, the American Chemical Society may be formatted as "ACS", "American Chemical Society", or "AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY" depending on whether abbreviations or capitalization are applied. Such variations make accurate name matching and citation linking difficult during bibliography processing. Establishing clear formatting guidelines is an important first step towards improving BibTeX data quality for corporate authors.

The Problem with Inconsistent BibTeX Styles

When publishing in multiple journal venues, authors often need to adapt their BibTeX entries to differing reference styles for each publisher. Most BibTeX styles fall into one of three camps when formatting corporate author names:

• The full organization name is spelled out
• An abbreviation for the organization is used
• The name is formatted in ALL CAPS

This situation means that a single organization can show up incompatibly across an author's publications depending solely on arbitrary style decisions. Such variation leads to three major issues:

1. Inability to programmatically match corporate entities for citation analysis. Matching "ACS" to "American Chemical Society" requires manual intervention or complex natural language processing.
2. Researcher confusion when styling organizations for their reference sections, potentially leading to accidental mismatches.
3. Metadata extraction errors where corporate authors are parsed differently by automated tools processing reference sections.

Overall, inconsistent BibTeX formatting leads to defective citation linking, limits the accuracy of bibliometrics related to corporate authors, and introduces manual cleanup work to align references across papers. By standardizing the representation format, compatibility can be drastically improved.

Best Practices for Corporate Author Formatting

To maximize matching accuracy and ease authoring requirements, corporate entities in BibTeX entries should follow these guidelines:

1. Spell out the complete formal name for the organization without abbreviations or acronyms.
2. Capitalize the first letter of all major words appearing in the name.
3. Omit generic structural phrases such as "Inc." or "Company". The organizational hierarchy can be determined from the full formal name.

For example, references to the American Chemical Society would appear as:

@article{...,
  author = "{American Chemical Society}",
}

Note the full formal spelling of the name with major words capitalized. Such standard formatting maximizes matching accuracy when citing corporate entities across journals and processing reference metadata.

Modifying BibTeX Style Templates

Compatibility issues largely originate from the defined BibTeX style templates used by publishers and conferences. These .bst style files encode the precise formatting rules for bibliography entries, including conventions around corporate authors.

To encourage improved uniformity, BibTeX styles should standardize using the following structure when handling corporate entities:

• Set format.org.names to use full long formal names without abbreviations.
• Set format.org.cap to title capitalization style for author names.

As an example, consider the following excerpt from a modified IEEE style file to enable consistent corporate author handling:

FORMAT
  format.org.names = "full-long"
  format.org.cap   = "title"
ENDFORMAT

This simple update ensures organizations are rendered in line with the best practices listed previously. To ease adoption, reference style maintainers should release updated .bst templates defaulting to these improved corporate author configurations.

Example Style Templates

As a starting point, reference the following BibTeX style examples with correctly configured corporate author handling:

• ieee-fullcorpauthor.bst - Updated IEEE template
• acm-fullcorpauthor.bst - Updated ACM template
• elsevier-fullcorpauthor.bst - Updated Elsevier template

These templates can serve as guides for other style maintainers seeking to improve support for organizational entities within their BibTeX formats.

Automated Cleanup of Existing Bibliographies

In addition to preventing future compatibility issues, existing BibTeX corpora should also be updated to apply improved naming conventions. While manual cleanup remains impractical at scale, automated scripting provides a path to bulk standardization.

For example, this Python script leverages regular expressions to parse BibTeX files and standardize corporate entity representations:

• fixcorpbib.py - BibTeX Corporate Author Formatter

Running this tool over existing reference libraries will automatically convert entries to use full long names with title case capitalization. This batch standardization enables accurate citation analysis and metadata extraction across older corpora.

Ongoing maintenance is also simplified - new BibTeX entries can be added seamlessly without worrying about stylistic deviations that might impede entity matching.

Outdated Guidelines to Avoid

When modifying style templates and refactoring BibTeX corpora, avoid repeating three common anti-patterns that negatively impact corporate entity compatibility:

1. Requiring all caps styling which hinders readability and accurate parsing.
2. Allowing abbreviated names that increase mismatch rates.
3. Including generic structural phrases that provide little additional context.

Modern best practices specifically move away from such outdated conventions. Updating legacy styles to instead spell out full formal names with title case capitalization represents the most robust configuration for exchanging and analyzing BibTeX metadata around corporate authors.

Conclusion

By standardizing BibTeX formatting conventions around corporate entities, publishers can drastically improve cross-compatibility and enable more accurate citation analysis. This guide has outlined clear steps that can be taken today to refactor styles, reference corpora, and authoring habits towards properly handling organizational authors.

With top publishers leading the charge on updated style templates, and automated tooling in place to unfirmly process back catalogs, the vision of a cleanly segmented, well organized academic landscape can be realized. The improvements to bibliometrics and research clarity will provide value across all disciplines.