Hierarchy of inheritance in bibtex crossrefs - not inheriting second layer

Question

I have entries in my bibtex file as follows:

@inproceedings{Kang2011,
    author = {Kang, Hongwen and Hebert, Martial and Kanade, Takeo},
    title = {{Discovering object instances from scenes of Daily Living}},
    crossref = {iccv-2011},
    pages = {762--769}
}

@proceedings{iccv-2011,
    crossref = {iccv},
    year = {2011} }

@misc{iccv,
    booktitle = {International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)}
}

The idea is that if I wish to change how a conference name is written, I need only do it in one place - this is inspired by this answer.

However, when compiling a latex document using this, the year from the @proceedings shows up in the bibliography, but not the conference name from @misc:

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Instead of using nested crossrefs, you can create strings, and use them instead on the innermost crossref. This should be compatible with the use in your example.

@inproceedings{Kang2011,
    author = {Kang, Hongwen and Hebert, Martial and Kanade, Takeo},
    title = {{Discovering object instances from scenes of Daily Living}},
    crossref = {iccv-2011},
    pages = {762--769}
}

@proceedings{iccv-2011,
    crossref = iccv,
    year = {2011} }

@string{iccv = {International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)}}

Answer 2

It can't be done. From the bibtex manual, page 3:

(Moreover, you may not reliably nest cross references; that is, a cross- referenced entry may not itself reliably cross reference an entry. This is almost certainly not something you’d want to do, though.)