When using the shortjournal field in humanities publications, the abbreviations are often put into a table at the start of the publication. With BibLaTeX this is nice and easy to do automatically. A map is made between all the entries cited which have a shortjournal field, and their corresponding journal fields. E.g. something like this:
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journal = {Journal of Hellenistic Studies},
shortjournal = {JoHS},
results in this entry in the Abbreviations table:
JoHS Journal of Hellenistic Studies
So when I do my BibTeX export, I include both the shortjournal field and the journal field. This works beautifully when I
The problem I'm running into is that the shortjournal field is included *even if* there's no mapping in the glossary. I realise that's great in most circumstances - the 'long' journal name is a good failsafe. But the problem is that it BibLaTeX expects that shortjournal, if it exists, is an abbreviated journal name and so it always adds the pair to its Abbreviations map. So now my Abbreviations section at the start of my book looks like this:
Iraq Iraq
JoHS Journal of Hellenistic Studies
because the entries for articles in the Iraq journal have something like this:
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journal = {Iraq},
shortjournal = {Iraq},
What BibLaTeX expects in this is more like:
That is, with no shortjournal field at all. To put it another way, shortjournal should only appear if it is an actual abbreviation of the full journal name, not if it is identical to the full journal name.
To generate a BibTeX file that corresponds with the BibLaTeX expectations for the shortjournal field, I need conditionality so that the field is only populated if it exists. My guess is that this is unsolvable with the current Bookends format system, because it would need some conditionality or special treatment of the
j and
f fields in the format manager.