[OS X TeX] [OT] Journal abbreviations in bibtex

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 24 mai 06 à 22:19, Charilaos Skiadas a écrit :

> I would guess there are different ones for each discipline. I must  
> admit I could not find any such files by a quick google search.

Not speaking about LaTeX/BibTeX abbreviations, but how scientific  
periodical titles are abbreviated: there does not seem to be any  
universal standard about this, or even any wide-ranging computer  
database containing the most common abbreviations for each journal in  
a given scientific field. Instead, each publisher, country or field  
seems to have its own standard.

For example, the dominant periodical in my field, the Journal of  
Fluid Mechanics, published in Cambridge UK by the Cambridge  
University Press, says at <http://jfm-www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/ 
style_summary.html> and <ftp://ftp.cup.cam.ac.uk/pub/texarchive/ 
journals/latex/jfm-sty/jfmnot.tex>:

"Short titles of Journals are based in general on the style of the  
{\it World List of Scientific Periodicals}."

I spent one afternoon last month, on the web then at the local  
University Library, trying to find out what this "World List of  
Scientific Periodicals" is. It seems to be a series of three huge  
volumes dating back to the 1960s, listing all periodicals together  
with their abbreviated title(s), only available in paper form and not  
updated since; meaning that most recent titles won't be found there.  
And it's very hard to try and find any logical pattern in the  
existing abbreviations, that could be extrapolated to more recent  
publications. However, it seems this List has been compiled by people  
from the British Library and has remained a favourite since in  
British countries (or is this just with CUP?). So much for the  
digital age!

Bruno Voisin------------------------- Info --------------------------
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