Source with range of years

Question

Some of my references are annual publications of which I'm using multiple editions. I cannot figure out, however, how to cite them with only 1 reference entry. In the text it should look something like this:

(IEA 1996-2012)

And in the References:

IEA 1996-2012. Energy Balances of non-OECD Countries, Paris.

BibTex does not seem to accept year-ranges in the year field...

Any help is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

BibTeX does accept year ranges, but then you have to enclose them in curly brackets. Tested with

@misc{yearrange,
  author = {F. Bar},
  title = {Some title},
  year = {2011--2013},
}

and

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\cite{yearrange}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{test}
\end{document}

The year range is uncommon, but allowed in general, so I would blame Mendeley for not supporting it. To quote btxdoc:

year field: The year of publication or, for an unpublished work, the year it was written. Generally it should consist of four numerals, such as 1984, although the standard styles can handle any year whose last four nonpunctuation characters are numerals, such as ‘(about 1984)’.

Answer 2

It seems that BiBLaTeX accepts date ranges in the date and, also, in the year fields (see section 2.3.8 of the manual; v2.6)

The range specification is 1988/1992