Handling quotes inside quotes in a bibliographic field

Question

I have an entry in my bib file of the form

@conference{abc,
author = "Some name",
title = ""This is inside quote" and outside quote content",
.
.
.
}

when I check this entry through jabref, I get an error saying that = is expected but found '"'. This is because the inside quote is not escaped. I looked into it and I found that we can allow " by putting it inside {}, like {"}. But if I do that I don't get "This is inside quote" and outside quote content as title instead I get {"}This is inside quote{"} and outside quote content. Can anyone please suggest me how to handle this?

Answer 1

Mico and Barbara Beeton have already commented that using -- as appropriate -- double quotes (``/ '') or single quotes (`/') for quotes with typographic meaning will resolve your error. And Andrew Swann has suggested to use commands like \enquote from the csquotes package for marking quotes within .bib files. I'll add that for users of biblatex there's another reason to do so: Depending on your bibliography style, article titles (contrary to book titles) may be put inside (outer) quotes, which means you should use inner quotes within article titles, but outer quotes within book titles, but only for those bibliography styles. Simply using \enquote spares you the hassle of keeping track of style requirements and quote nesting levels.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{A01,
  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {An article title with a \enquote{quote}},
  journaltitle = {A journal},
  number = {1},
  pages = {1--4},
}
@book{B02,
  author = {Buthor, B.},
  year = {2002},
  title = {A book title with a \enquote{quote}},
  location = {Somewhere},
  publisher = {A publisher},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\nocite{*}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}