Is it possible to suppress a specific field from bibtex .bbl in biblatex?

Question

I'm using biblatex, and am still very new at it.

I can't figure out how to suppress certain fields automatically generated from my bibtex file into my .bbl file. For instance, for all of my entries, I have a category Language in which I record the language that that work was written in. This is just for my own database, and I don't want this information listed in the References at the end of my article/book. But it gets listed anyway. The same is true of my notes field. Is there anyway to suppress a specific field so that it does not show up in the "List of References"?

I would write my own style, but my knowledge of programming/TeX is not even close to being able to do that. I've noticed there is a solution for the ISBN number (an option isbn=false), and this is exactly what I need, but for different fields.

Answer 1

The command \clearlist can be used to suppress a category. You can read more details in the documenation

texdoc biblatex

In the MWE below I have used filecontents* to create the bibliography, but if you already have a .bib file then you can delete these lines.

% this part creates mybib.bib
% delete these lines if you already have a .bib file
\begin{filecontents*}{mybib.bib}
@BOOK{Ab_Steg,
 author = "M. Abramowitz and I. A. Stegun",
 title = {Handbook of mathematical functions},
 publisher = "Dover publications",
 year = "1965",
 language="English" }
\end{filecontents*}
% end delete

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{biblatex}

\bibliography{mybib}
\AtEveryBibitem{\clearlist{language}} % clears language
\AtEveryBibitem{\clearfield{note}}    % clears notes

\begin{document}

hello world \cite{Ab_Steg}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

The compilation sequence is

pdflatex myfile.tex
biber myfile.bcf
pdflatex myfile.tex
pdflatex myfile.tex

(You don't have to use the extensions if you don't want to.)

Answer 2

If you are using Biber rather than BibTeX, you can supress/map any fields before BibLaTeX even sees them. See section 3.1.1 of the Biber PDF manual. For example, in your case, you could put this in your biber.conf (version 0.9.8+):

<config>
  <sourcemap>
    <maps datatype="bibtex" map_overwrite="1">
      <map>
        <map_step map_field_set="LANGUAGE" map_null="1"/>
        <map_step map_field_set="NOTES" map_null="1"/>
      </map>
    </maps>
  </sourcemap>
</config>

You can also do this only for specific entrytypes. See the Biber manual. There is a also a document level macro interface to this, see the biblatex 2.0+ manual. In your preamble, you could do the following, which is equivalent to the above:

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex, overwrite]{
    \map{
      \step[fieldset=language, null]
      \step[fieldset=notes, null]
    }
  }
}