# Having 1961/62 in the year field rather than 1961

This is the fourth question on the annotated bibliography project we are working on (1, 2, 3). This was originally a part of the third question but as moewe suggested, I'm making a new question for it.

I have a long annotated bibliography (200+ entries) in biblatex. In the year field of some of the entries, there is a sequence like 1961/62 rather than a single 4 digit number (1961 or 1962). Hence, when I sort the references chronologically, such entries appear first. One solution would be to remove /62 and only include 1961 as the year. However, we want to be as loyal as possible to the main source (usually MathSciNet) so the reader is not confused when browsing for the references. So, we want 1961/62 to appear in the year field.

Here's my MWE:

\documentclass{amsart}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage[sorting=ynt, backend=biber, style=numeric-comp]{biblatex}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@article {ref1,
AUTHOR = {Chebyshev, P.},
TITLE = {{Lettre de M. le professeur Tchebychev a M. Fuss, sur un nouveau th{e}oreme relatif aux nombres premiers contenus dans la formes $4n+1$ et $4n+3$.}},
FJOURNAL = {Bull. de la Classe phys. math. de l'Acad. Imp. des Sciences St. Petersburg},
VOLUME = {11},
YEAR = {1853},
LANGUAGE = {french},
annotation = {Chebyshev's paper which was the starting point of the subject.},
}
@article{ref2,
AUTHOR = {Phragmen, P.},
TITLE = {{Sur le logarithme integral et la fonction $f(x)$ de Riemann}},
YEAR  = {1891},
FJOURNAL = {\"{O}fversigt af Kongl. Vetenskaps--Akademiens F\"{o}handlingar.},
LANGUAGE = {French},
VOLUME = {48},
}
@article{ref3,
AUTHOR = {Landau, E.},
TITLE = {{U}ber einen {S}atz von {T}schebyschef},
JOURNAL = {Math. Ann.},
FJOURNAL = {Mathematische Annalen},
VOLUME = {61},
YEAR = {1906},
NUMBER = {4},
}
@article{ref4,
author={Littlewood, J. E. },
title={{Sur la distribution des nombres premiers}},
year={1961/62},
volume={158},
journal={Comptes Rendus de l'Acad. Sci. Paris},
language={French},
}
@article{ref5,
author={Hardy, G. H. and Littlewood, J. E. },
title={{Contributions to the theory of the Riemann zeta-function and the theory of the distribution of primes}},
year={1916},
journal={Acta Math.},
volume={41},
number={1},
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}

\section{Chronological bibliography}

\end{document}


And here is how it looks: As you see, the first entry should appear last in the chronological order, but it appears first.

year   = {1961/62},


produces the Biber warning

WARN - year field '1961/62' in entry 'ref4' is not an integer
- this will probably not sort properly.


Ideally, you would use ISO 8601 date input with the date field. Then a year range is given as yyyy/yyyy

date = {1961/1962},


By default this will not produce

1961/62

though, it will show as

1961–1962

There is a way to get biblatex to use slashes here, but it is a bit involved, see https://github.com/LukasCBossert/biblatex-archaeologie/issues/133.

If you insist on using year with a 'hard-coded' 1961/62 you can get the sorting right using sortyear

year     = {1961/62},
sortyear = {1961},

• I think sortyear does the job. I checked and it works perfectly. Thank you! – Amir Hossein Jul 20 '19 at 21:03