Help for AIAA @misc when using the Zotero-Overleaf plugin?

rpalmer47
Configuration: I'm using Z7, Overleaf, the newest new-aiaa.bst and .cls templates provided from AIAA/Overleaf, and the Zotero plugin for Overleaf.

I know this isn't directly a Zotero issue, but I'm hoping someone in the community has seen it before. It's difficult to tell which fields in Zotero correlate with which typenames the plugin uses.

When I preview the citation style for some items (that AIAA considers @misc) inside Zotero, it looks great. When I switch into Overleaf, fields are missing (and extra commas added). I've tried going through the code, but I can't seem to figure out the solution. Anyone already done this? I've looked in the usual places online, but no relevant results come back for my queries.

Attaching some pics to illustrate. Any advice would be appreciated! I don't want to make this .bib file by hand after all the work already invested in *not* having to do it by hand... y'know how it is :)
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u10211737/y4y10gkmllnzwaow08s9.png
  • adamsmith
    FWIW, I think both styles use the date field, it just loses the day in bibtex.

    This really looks like the new-aiaa.bst has issues -- including that stray comma between date and title, the weird URL etc. Zotero misc export looks great to me. I don't know a ton about .bst styles, but you should be able to fix some of the obvious issues (such as the missing publisher) in this section:
    https://github.com/Flyingbobcats/journal/blob/master/new-aiaa.bst#L1286C1-L1299C2
  • rpalmer47
    Yeah, the Zotero export does look mighty good. Perhaps I'll just have to build a new bibtex file from Zotero main, at the very end from whatever is sourced. Undesirable, but better than the mess of floating commas I have now. There's no way to option out the URL if a DOI is provided, either! I was so happy to retain live-citation ability with the Zotero plugin (I switched from MS Word this year, still figuring it out). Oh well..

    About the date: I was getting the "????" flag in Overleaf if the 'Date' field was empty. Zotero desktop handles the swap just fine, but Zotero plugin/new-aiaa.bst couldn't parse the year from the 'Accessed' field. Such a weird thing. I'm glad to know you think it's the .bst and not just me doing something wrong!
    Hopefully this thread helps someone else who also thinks they're going nuts.

    Thanks for the link. I've never written my own .bst and the syntax is a bit confusing... not sure I have time to learn it right now... maybe for the next publication.
  • adamsmith
    edited 15 days ago
    I think the bst expects access dates to be in "howpublished". Since BibTeX predates the WWW, there's not 'right' option here; we decided urldate was more common, but this type of stuff is why BibTeX can be so frustrating.
    If you have the option to use BibLaTeX, that's much more consistent (and Zotero exports both) -- https://github.com/nasa/nasa-latex-docs/blob/master/support/citations/aiaa/aiaa.bbx looks like it might be a BibLaTeX option for AIAA, but not sure.
  • rpalmer47
    Oh, wow, I just realized that .bst isn't biblatex! No wonder. I guess I didn't consider that I had the option of using anything other than the provided template, which is obviously silly. The whole point of open-source is... yeah.

    I just swapped in the .bbx you linked, and it looks awesome. Thank you so much! Sorry if this should have been obvious, I still have a lot to learn.
  • rpalmer47
    Hmm, actually, that didn't work right. It looks like I can't use the nasa git repo for Overleaf, it's a pretty complex file structure and I'm just getting more lost. I was able to configure everything but how the author names display, and that's just a huge mess. I'm actually better off at this point just going back to the .bst and pretending the dangling commas don't exist.
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