Displaying only the starting page of a page range in bibliographies

Question

I'm battling with this for couple of hours now...

My supervisor asked me to generate the bibliography in a certain style, for articles I need to do:

Author 1; Author 2, Journal name, volume, page, (year)

Where the volume, page and year are number (page is only the starting page of the article)

For chapters I need:

Author 1; Autoher 2, In Book name, page editors: Editor 1; Editor2; (publisher, city, year).

Again, year is a number and page is the staring page

Finally, books follow the same logic

Editor 1; Editor 2, Book name, (publisher, city, year).

I tried to do this through makebst but it insist on using page range. I tried to search for a bst files online but all I found was list without examples. Where can I find a list with examples or a generator for bst files?

I also considered switching to biblatex but couldn't find any clear notion wither or not biblatex provides control over citation style.

Answer 1

Here's a solution using biblatex. Note that \mkfirstpage uses \mkpageprefix as a post-processor instead of these commands simply being nested; see section 4.6.4 of the biblatex manual for details.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{biblatex}

\DeclareFieldFormat{pages}{\mkfirstpage[{\mkpageprefix[bookpagination]}]{#1}}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article{Bli74,
  author = {Blinder, Alan S.},
  year = {1974},
  title = {The economics of brushing teeth},
  journaltitle = {Journal of Political Economy},
  volume = {82},
  number = {4},
  pages = {887--891},
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\nocite{*}

\begin{document}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Answer 2

Inter alia, you stated:

I tried to do this through makebst but it insist on using page range.

This is strange: When I invoke the makebst program (latex makebst from the command line) and follow the prompts, I eventually get to the question

PAGE NUMBERS:
(*) Start and stop page numbers given
(f) Only start page number
  Select:

Note that you have to type f to invoke the non-default option. This question comes right after the question YEAR IN JOURNAL SPECIFICATION and right before the LARGE PAGE NUMBER question.

If you can't rerun the makebst program to create a bst file to your (or, rather, your adviser's) liking, you could also edit your existing bst file, as follows:

1. Insert the following bibtex function between the bibtex functions format.pages and format.journal.pages (Where exactly these functions are located within the bst file can vary):

   FUNCTION {first.page}
   { 't :=
     ""
       {  t empty$ not t #1 #1 substring$ "-" = not and }
       { t #1 #1 substring$ *
         t #2 global.max$ substring$ 't :=
       }
     while$
   }
   

2. In the existing function format.journal.pages, replace the line

   n.dashify

   with

   first.page

This should do the trick too, I believe. Happy (Bib)TeXing!

Answer 3

If memory serves, the page range is a single entry in a bib file. Take the entry below for example.

@article{Chuang1997,
    author = {Chuang, Isaac and Nielsen, Michael A.},
    day = {1},
    doi = {10.1080/09500349708231894},
    issn = {0950-0340},
    journal = {Journal of Modern Optics},
    month = nov,
    number = {11},
    pages = {2455--2467},
    publisher = {Taylor \& Francis},
    title = {Prescription for experimental determination of the dynamics of a quantum black box},
    url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500349708231894},
    volume = {44},
    year = {1997}
}

Unfortunately the easy way to achieve what you want is to process your bib file entry by entry to remove the double dash and second page. Or you can do this fairly easily using sed. I use the below in one of my bash scripts, and it may serve your needs provided you have a well formatted bibtex library.

sed -e 's/pages = {\(.*\)-.*--.*-.*},/pages = {\1},/' <input_bibtex_file.bib >output.bib

It's been a while since I wrote that though. Otherwise sticking with makebst is a good idea. I used it for my thesis and hand edited the style file to add DOI links in.

ADDITION: Looking through a bst file I once constructed, this may do what you want. It grabs just the first page. No guarantees though, and other symbols like "+" may remain.

FUNCTION {first.page}
{ 't :=
  ""
    {  t empty$ not t #1 #1 substring$ "-" = not and }
    { t #1 #1 substring$ *
      t #2 global.max$ substring$ 't :=
    }
  while$
}

FUNCTION {format.journal.pages}
{ pages duplicate$ empty$ 'pop$
    { swap$ duplicate$ empty$
        { pop$ pop$ format.pages }
        {
          " " *
          swap$
          first.page
          "pages" bibinfo.check
          *
        }
      if$
    }
  if$
}