On my system a search for SLACcitation
in $TEXMF/bibtex/bst/
only turns up the REVTeX styles. On CTAN there is also chetref.bst
, but the code for SLACcitation
there is commented out. SPIRES: BibTeX Style Files lists a few other styles.
The REVTeX 4.1 announcement mentions SLACcitation
in association with arXiv support, but does not explain the use of the field further.
SPIRES: BibTeX Style Files and LaTeX Output and SPIRES citation gathering (Wayback machine snapshot from 2004-10-26) as well as BibTeX from SPIRES (Wayback machine snapshot from 2004-12-24) suggest that SLACcitation
contains some kind of citation metadata that is/was used by SPIRES probably to track citations. (Cf. also http://www.inr.ac.ru/~fedor/jabref/spires2.3.patch)
All styles that support the field write it in a line of its own, so that an entry in the .bbl
would look like (from LaTeX Output and SPIRES citation gathering (Wayback machine snapshot from 2004-10-26))
\bibitem{Morningstar:1997ff}
C.J.~Morningstar and M.~Peardon,
%``Efficient glueball simulations on anisotropic lattices,"
Phys. Rev. {\bf D56}, 4043 (1997)
hep-lat/9704011.
%%CITATION = PHRVA,D56,4043;%%
Due to the %%
in front of the CITATION
LaTeX would ignore the rest of the line and the SLACcitation
field would produce no output in the bibliography. The tag is only visible in the source code. Indeed LaTeX Output and SPIRES citation gathering (Wayback machine snapshot from 2004-10-26) says
Our program looks for the %%CITATION
tag in your .tex
file (which, of course, will not show up in the printed copy of your paper).
but does not go on to explain what exactly the program does. http://inspirehep.net/info/faq/references_citations also suggests that
As usual SLACcitation
will be ignored by all styles where the field has not been declared. It is also ignored by (standard) biblatex
(and all contributed styles I know), but if it were read by biblatex
the %%
would produce errors if the field was not read in verbatim mode.
Since there is no further documentation of the field and no other mentions on the web besides the meagre few sites mentioned above and a great many exported .bib
entries, I doubt this field is very important, let alone required for REVTeX. INSPIRE References and Citations: How can I ensure my references are fully extracted? refers to formats that output the %%CITATION
metadata, but it is not clear to me from the rest of this site that the tag is a requirement.
I contacted INSPIRE about this. This is their prompt reply
SPIRES (INSPIRE's predecessor) used to extract references for papers
from LaTeX sources. Putting a %%CITATION = ...
comment in a
reference was a clever trick to make it easy to identify the cited
record without it affecting the typeset paper. That's why it appeared
in (and still does on INSPIRE) in the LaTeX export formats. For people
who were using BibTeX to handle their bibliography instead of getting
straight bibitem
s from SPIRES, some additional trick was needed to
have bibtex output the proper comment: the SLACcitation
field was
added to the BibTeX export format, so that a BibTeX style could just
pick up that field and put it somewhere in the reference to have it
recognized properly by SPIRES.
As authors needed to do many things to make it work properly and
parsing TeX is hard, this method of recognizing references was
abandoned on INSPIRE. Instead, references are now extracted from the
PDF and citations identified by searching our records for potential
matches, based on identifiers (DOI, arXiv ID, etc.) and publication
information (journal title, volume, pages, etc.). We also try to match
the citation key (which appears in the PDF as a named destination when
hyperref
is used), as the keys we expose in the LaTeX/BibTeX export
formats are unique identifiers for papers on INSPIRE. The %%CITATION = ...
comment and assorted BibTeX field have survived until now, but will be removed in an upcoming update of INSPIRE as they are no longer
needed.
That more or less confirms the findings and speculations from above.
%%CITATION =
was used to identify citations without affecting the typeset output
SLACcitation
was used to produce %%CITATION =
from .bib
files
- nowadays
%%CITATION
and SLACcitation
are not used any more
"..."
and{...}
forSLACcitation
. Did you get different behaviour? If so, how did the behaviour differ? As far as I can see the information is just written as is in a new line to the.bbl
file, but since it starts with%%
it is ignored in the output. I guess it is supposed to be some kind of metadata for citation analysis. – moewe Dec 30 '18 at 19:05