bibtex export gives extra {} for pages entry

bjoerns · January 15, 2009

I added http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0268-1242/21/11/S01 to my zotero collection without problems. However, if I export my bibliography to bibtex, I get an additional pair of curly bracket {} around the page number:

pages = {{S1--S9}}

which lets bibtex produce some error message (was not that easy to figure out what precisely went wrong). Is there a way to circumvent this, because it is quite annoying to change these references (seems to be a general problem with Semicond. Sci. Tech.) by hand everytime I newly export my bibliography.

bjoerns · October 5, 2009

Can nobody either confirm the problem or provide a solution to it?

noksagt · October 5, 2009

You do not say what error you are getting in BibTeX or what style you are using. I think some BibTeX styles should handle this as-is.

I think the reason that Zotero uses the extra brackets is because you have uppercase letters in that field & we therefore attempt to preserve the case. I don't recall all of the non-numeric pages I've run across. We could not preserve case in the page field or could be more conservative in the case we protect (by closing bracket sets at not only whitespace, but also dashes).

bjoerns · October 5, 2009

I use the revtex style for Physical Review B. The error message I get is "File ended while scanning use of \bibinfo." Furthermore the resulting pdf finishes right in the bibliograph section: "Semicond. Sci. Tech. 21".

Concerning your objections against dropping the additional brackets I must say that when I manually drop them, I get the correct result of uppercase letters: "Semicond. Sci. Tech. 21 S1". But maybe closing brackets at dashes is a good solution for everybody?!?