Way of displaying "Editors" in the listing

If you would like to write a chapter on custom styles here... http://drupal.org/node/111016 feel free :-)

Which export format are you using? If BibTex, I was also thinking of dumping all the fields which don't specifically map to BibTex fields, with just the biblio field name (minus the "biblio_" part of course).

I have been working on a "full dump" of biblio information (mainly to be used for backup and restore purposes) but it's XML format. This dump routine does a full "node load" on each entry so information added by external modules, and revisions are also captured.

For BibTex, is sounds like a "wire your own" GUI (much like admin/settings/biblio/fields) might be the way to go, so you could specify which biblio fields go to bibtex fields and you could also make up your own bibtex fields at will.

Subscribing -- isn't it a bug that editors are not shown in the listing? For example, for a conference proceedings publication type, the listing shows empty authors, whereas it really should show "A. One, Two, B, Three C. (Eds.) What a great conference..."

Or should editors go into the primary "Authors" field? I'm a bit confused since I'm used to working with BibTeX, which has explicit "author" and "editor" fields, whereas biblio uses first, second, etc. authors? Why are they called "Secondary Authors" and not "Editors"?

I can't speak to the issue of how to fix the conference proceedings display to show editors, and I don't work with BibTex, but I can tell you the principle behind the use of primary authors and secondary authors.

Many publications have multiple layers of authors. A chapter in a collection of essays, for example, will typically have two: the "primary" author who wrote the article and the "secondary" author who is the editor of the collection. But the "secondary" author need not be an editor. Depending on the context, a "secondary" author could be a translator, an illustrator, a sound engineer, etc. And looking at it from the other side, there are some cases where the "primary" author is actually the editor. If, for example, you are citing a collection of essays as a single work, rather than citing a specific essay within it, then the editor would be more properly identified as the primary author. I would guess that the editors should be listed as primary authors for most conference proceeding publications, but if you are citing a single paper from within the conference proceedings collection, then the presenter would be the primary author and the editor(s) of the proceedings would be the secondary author.

Phil.

I think the way biblio handles these multiple layers of authors is backwards, since you cannot tell what the role of a "Secondary" author is when you view a biblio entry -- was it an editor? translator? something else? It seems by default the secondary authors are imported/exported from/to BibTeX's "editor" field, but if can be a different role, this is problematic at best.

Instead of having five different input lists for authors (first, secondary, third, corporate, etc.) I would just have one list of names, but allow to set a "role" for each, i.e., a list of (name, role) pairs. The roles can then be user defined (and custom mapped), but the default list of roles would contain the current ("author", "editor", "translator", "corporate", ..."). This way, you can unambiguously tell what the role of a person is and display it in the record. It would also make for a cleaner user interface.

Seems like my comments just muddied the waters and now that I look into it a bit further, are probably somewhat misleading too. There is a file called biblio.field.type.data.csv included in the root folder of biblio. That file details the various roles that are assigned to biblio_secondary_authors, biblio_tertiary_authors, etc. I've used that file when I wanted to customize a style output for a particular tpe of work. And it appears that almost all biblio_secondary_authors are indeed editors of some sort or another.

The default biblio view of the full record uses the generic names for the author fields rather than substituting whatever name appears in the field.type.data.csv file. I can see why it might be helpful to have the field names match the associated field content when manually editing or adding records. You should be able to create a custom output style that will display this info the way you want. You can also customize the name "Secondary Authors" for all publication types via the Biblio settings -> Fields options, but this will not allow you to use "Editor" for Conference Proceedings and something else for a different publication type. This changes the generic label used wherever the generic label appears.

Phil.

(Note to self: remember to keep quiet when I don't know what I'm talking about)

Ok, so for the table view, I used the workaround of changing the field name globally to "Editors".

However, this doesn't help with the problem that editors are not displayed in the list view -- that's a bug, no? I'm using IEEE style, and at least for this style it is well-defined how editors are to be shown in a citation (e.g., for conference proceedings or an edited monograph).

Finally, I'm still not convinced on that first, second, third, corporate, etc. author business. Wouldn't it be much simpler and more flexible if we had just one author list as I suggested above, where each author can have a (user-definable) role. Like in this ASCII mock-up :)

       Authors
       ========
        NAME                   ROLE
        myAuthor1              Author
        myAuthor2              Author
        myAuthor3              Editor
        myAuthor4              Translator
           ...                     ...

I have to admit that I've been thinking the same thing about the author entry form and it's complexities, and there probably is a case to be made for a single "contributor" entry form as opposed to 5.

As for your IEEE editors, yes it's a bug (that style was contributed by a user, who obviously never encountered publications with editors :-). The good news is that the 6.x-2.x branch will include a new CSL citation processing engine which should eliminate these issues.

It's been a while... I fixed the list display in the biblio_style_ieee to show the editor when no author is available (e.g., for a conference proceedings entry):

  $editors = theme('biblio_format_authors', $node->biblio_contributors[2], $author_options, $inline);
  ...
   if (!empty($node->biblio_contributors[2])) {
     $output .= '<span class="biblio-authors">' . $editors . " (Eds.), </span> \n";
  }

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