How to abbreviate journal name in citation

Question

I'm writing my research proposal and my supervisor wants me to abbreviate the journal name (and remove part of the month from the publication date). How can I achieve that?

Edit: I am using BibTeX and my .bib file holds the full journal name. I writing using Emacs on an Arch Linux machine. I don't really mind switching to other LaTeX format but I don't know anything about them.

Answer 1

A while back I created a package and some BibTeX styles for automatic journal abbreviations that uses the ISSN database to do exactly this: https://github.com/compholio/jabbrv

This is now included as an Overleaf template: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/automatic-journal-abbreviations/mxfsdscmvxcr

Edit: Changed link to git repository (old link: http://www.compholio.com/latex/jabbrv/)

Answer 2

EDIT: There is an elegant way now with biber 0.9.6. Together with biblatex 1.7. the data can be changed on the fly without changing the input .bib file itself. It utilizes the map feature of biber as described in section 3.1.1 of the manual. The biber.conf file looks like this:

<map>
  <bibtex>
  BMAP_OVERWRITE 1
    <globalfield journal>
      BMAP_MATCH Physical\sReview
      BMAP_REPLACE "Phys. Rev."
    </globalfield>
  </bibtex>
</map>

which would replace Physical Review with Phys. Rev. Please find a verbose explanation in my answer to this question.

/EDIT

One possible way would be to come up with a work abbreviation. Then, you use the editor of your choice and search and replace the journal title with the work abbreviation. Let's say the journal is A long journal name and you call it alj. You replace Journal={A long journal name} with Journal=alj in the bibtex file. Now, you can make two bibtex files: short.bib and long.bib with the content @string{alj="A l. J. N."} and @string{alj="A long journal name"}, respectively. Whenever you feel like it, you can add another way to display the journal title.

MWE (you could have provided that):

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
Test\cite{brown08}

\bibliography{long,cvpubs}
\bibliographystyle{unsrt}

\end{document}

use either \bibliography{long,cvpubs} or \bibliography{short,cvpubs} for long or short journal titles.

cvpubs.bib:

@article{brown08,
    Author = {Seth Brown and Michael Cole and Albert Erives},
    Journal = alj,
    Title = {Evolution of the holozoan ribosome biogenesis regulon},
    Volume = {9},
    Year = {2008},
    Pages = {113}

short.bib:

@string{alj="A l. J. N."}

long.bib

@string{alj="A long journal name"}

leading to

and

Answer 3

You should be aware that the abbreviation is not arbitrary, because there is the standard ISO 4 that defines a List of Title Word Abbreviations (LTWA). As far as I know, every abbreviation is unique, so that abbreviating/un-abbreviating should work unambigously in both directions.

The CAS has a small online tool CASSI that can be used to search for journal names and/or their official LTWA abbreviation.

JabRef has a journal name abbreviation feature that also uses the LTWA. This feature can be configured under Options → Manage journal abbreviations.

Answer 4

I have made a little Python script that processes a bibtex database, searching for the journal names and replacing them with their official abbreviation (taken from the Jabref source): https://gist.github.com/FilipDominec/9ff081952dbc4aae1df657a56c3db4ea

Answer 5

betterbib (a small project of mine) now gives you a choice on the journal names; short ones are the default. Simply install with

pip install betterbib

and run it over your bib file:

betterbib update your.bib > out.bib

Use --long-journal-name/-l to switch to long journal names.

EDIT: The package has been update and now the > is necessary to make this work.

Answer 6

I ended up writing a simple Python script that takes a bibtex file, and creates a copy of that file with journal names replaced by their abbreviations. It can be found here: https://gitlab.com/GuusAvis/abbreviate_journals .

In my case I really wanted something with little overhead (doing one thing and one thing only) that I could easily understand. This led me to try and use the script posted by @dominecf. However, it replaced more fields in my bibtex file than I wanted, and is based on a list of abbreviations that has in the mean time been outdated. I ended up editing this script posted on github in response to the one made by @dominecf, and combining it with the abbrv.jabref.org database such that it automatically remains up to date (the other script tries to pull a version that no longer exists).

It also allows choosing which abbreviation lists from the abbrv.jabref.org database to use. This can be useful, as there appear to be conflicts between those lists, potentially resulting in undesired behavior. This is what happened to me when using jabref to add abbreviations.

Hopefully there is someone who still finds this useful, almost twelve years after the original question was posed!

Answer 7

This is a common problem. My solution

pipx install bibiso4
bibiso4 your_refs.bib > iso4_your_refs.bib