[OS X TeX] abbreviations in Bibtex

[Nitecki, Zbigniew H.]

I’m confused by the following phenomenon:

Following the LaTex Companion, \S 13.2.3 (pp 769ff), I tried to make my references to standard journals uniform by putting, at the beginning of my .bib file, a set of abbreviations in the following format (eg):
@string{Acta =``Acta Mathematica''}

and then use the abbreviation in the following way (eg):
@article{Poincare:residues,
author={Henri Poincar\'e},
title={\foreignlanguage{french}{Sur les residusdes int\'egrales doubles}},
journal=Acta,
volume={9},
year={1886/7},
pages={321-380}
}

I get an error messages in my console:
This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (TeX Live 2017)
The top-level auxiliary file: Coeur.aux
The style file: plain.bst
Database file #1: calculus.bib
Warning--string name "``acta" is undefined
--line 2 of file calculus.bib
Missing "}" in string command---line 2 of file calculus.bib
 : @string{acta  =``acta
 :                       Mathematica''}
I'm skipping whatever remains of this command

and it seems to quit after a lot of these kinds of errors.

What am I doing wrong?  Has the format changed since the Latex Companion was written?



Zbigniew Nitecki
Department of Mathematics
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155

telephones:
Office    (617)627-3843
Dept.    (617)627-3234
Dept. fax    (617)627-3966
http://www.tufts.edu/~znitecki/




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