inukshuk
Add "crossref" tag
It would be nice if a "crossref" tag could be added which would allow at least some automation in the following cases:
In some bibliographies, individual contributions to a collection include cross-references to an entry for the volume as a whole. See, e.g., CMoS, 16e, 15.37, "Cross-references to other titles in reference lists":
Draper, Joan E. 1987. “Paris by the Lake: Sources of Burnham’s Plan of Chicago.” In Zukowsky 1987, 107–19.
Harrington, Elaine. 1987. “International Influences on Henry Hobson Richardson’s Glessner House.” In Zukowsky 1987, 189–207.
Zukowsky, John, ed. 1987. Chicago Architecture, 1872–1922: Birth of a Metropolis. Munich: Prestel-Verlag in association with the Art Institute of Chicago.
I imagine a user would tag "In Zukowsky 1987" as "crossref", and anystyle would export "Zukowsky 1987" (or some variant without spaces, e.g., "zukowsky1987") to the bibtex/biblatex field "crossref".
I am not sure how this could be automated further, so I imagine users would then be responsible themselves to ensure a proper match between the content of the crossref fields and the cite key of the containing entry.
As to CSL, the content of the "crossref" tag could be exported to the "booktitle" variable, e.g. in square brackets, like "[Zukowsky 1987]". Again, users would have to fix such entries manually.
Judging from the new training data we've received through the anystyle.io editor this is very crucial topic. Also, in my own experience of parsing bibliographies resolving these sort of references always was a tricky issue that, ultimately, I doubt the parser could automate completely. But like you say, it would be good to detect these instances that look like a reference and mark them clearly. I would hesitate to call them 'crossref' because in most cases some sort of post-processing will be required; perhaps just call it 'container-reference'?
That is:
Harrington, Elaine. 1987. “International Influences on Henry Hobson Richardson’s
Glessner House.” <container-reference>In Zukowsky 1987,</container-reference> 189–207.
As opposed to:
Harrington, Elaine. 1987. “International Influences on Henry Hobson Richardson’s
Glessner House.” <editor>In John Zukowsky, ed.,</editor> <container>Chicago
Architecture, 1872–1922: Birth of a Metropolis</container>189–207.
"crossref", on the other hand, would have the advantage that at least for those familiar with bibtex/biblatex the new tag’s intended use case would be transparent without further explanation. Besides, CMoS itself calls these elements "cross-references" (see above).
Do you know how other apps react if you feed them bibtex with invalid crossref values? I think it's important that the bib files downloaded from anystyle.io can be opened without any errors, that's why I was arguing against calling the field 'crossref' – otherwise I agree that it makes for a good choice.
If a crossref field contains a nonexistent cite key, nothing bad will happen, except that any information that would else be inherited from the crossreferenced = parent entry will not be available – until the content of the crossref field is fixed by the user.