BIBSORT 1 "08 October 1999" "Version 0.14" [section 6 of 11]

CAVEATS

The user must be aware that sorting a bibliography is not without peril, for at least these reasons:

1.

BibTeX has a requirement that entry labels given in crossref = label pairs in a bibliography entry must refer to entries defined later, rather than earlier, in the bibliography file. This regrettable implementation limitation of the current (pre-1.0) BibTeX prevents arbitrary ordering of entries when crossref values are present. To partially solve this problem, bibsort will place ``@Proceedings'' entries last, since they are frequently cross-referenced by ``@InProceedings'' entries. However, it is also possible for ``@Book'', ``@InBook'', and ``@InCollection'' entries to cross-reference ``@Book'' entries, and for ``@Article'' entries to cross-reference other ``@Article'' entries. Neither of these cases are dealt with by bibsort, except that ``@Book'' entries that contain a ``booktitle'' assignment, and entries that are explicitly cross-referenced before their definition, are sorted with ``@Proceedings'',

2.

If the BibTeX file contains interspersed commentary between ``@keyword{...}'' entries, this material will be considered part of the preceding entry, and will be sorted with it. Leading commentary is more common, and will be moved elsewhere in the file.

This is normally not a problem for the part 1 material before the ``@Preamble'', since it is kept together at the beginning of the output stream.

3.

Some kinds of bibliography files should be kept in a different order than alphabetically by citation labels. Good examples are a bibliography file with the contents of a journal, or a personal publication list, for both of which chronological publication order is likely to be preferred.

While a much more sophisticated implementation of bibsort could deal with the first point, and the -byvolume option provides a partial solution to the third point, in general, a satisfactory solution requires human intelligence and natural language understanding that computers lack.

bibsort uses octal ASCII control characters 001 through 007, 0177, and 0377, for temporary modifications of the input stream. If any of these are already present in the input, they will be altered on output. This is unlikely to be a problem, because those characters have neither a printable representation, nor are they conventionally used to mark line or page boundaries in text files.