They do have a rather strange numbering scheme. There are 12 "issues"
per year, and the volume number is the same as the year number, and
really is 4 digits. (Most online-only journals (unless, perhaps, they
have a history of paper publication) tend to have one volume per year,
usually starting at vol. 1 whenever the journal was founded, and article identifiers instead of page numbers, with no issues or numbers within
the volumes. Example: https://astro.theoj.org/ .)

ADS tends to treat their issues like volumes in their identifiers (which normally don't have issues or numbers), but this isn't completely
consistent since they start over at 1 every year whereas volumes are
usually continuously numbered. Of course, together with the year it is
a unique identifier.

Actually, they aren't even consistent themselves, recommending citations
such as JCAP08(2016)013 which, aside from being ugly, would normally
suggest vol. 8, p. 13 from year 2016. Bu their website clearly
indicates that the volume number is the same is the year and that the
other number is the issue number (usually, in most journals, not given
in the reference list).

So for, say, volume 2013, issue 5, id or page 37 there would be the
choice of

5, 37, 2013

or

2013, 13, 2013.

if the order is volume, page, year.

There doesn't seem to be an official recommendation, and like I wrote
the journal itself is inconsistent.

What do people here do? Is there any official recommendation?

Of course, with links to the DOI in the reference list, the actual form
is less important than it once was. Still, many journals, whether
electronic or paper or both, still have conventional reference lists.

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On Thu, 09 Apr 2020, "Phillip Helbig wrote:

So for, say, volume 2013, issue 5, id or page 37 there would be the
choice of
5, 37, 2013
or
2013, 13, 2013.

What do people here do? Is there any official recommendation?

On the ADS page
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013JCAP...05..037G/abstract
they use the form 2013JCAP...05..037G
so I suppose it's safe to use a variant of that.

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In article <5e90dcb0.869009609@news.aioe.org>, Eric Flesch
<eric@flesch.org> writes:

On Thu, 09 Apr 2020, "Phillip Helbig wrote:

[about how to cite articles in JCAP which has an unorthodox numbering
scheme]

So for, say, volume 2013, issue 5, id or page 37 there would be the
choice of
5, 37, 2013
or
2013, 13, 2013.

What do people here do? Is there any official recommendation?

On the ADS page https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013JCAP...05..037G/abstract
they use the form 2013JCAP...05..037G
so I suppose it's safe to use a variant of that.

That's what I went with. ADS is not an official recommendation, but is
to some extent a de-facto standard. One reason I went with it is that
it conforms to ADS. It also avoids having the same number twice (as the
volume number and the year), which looks strange and like a mistake. It
also follows their own standard about how the articles should be cited
(the "cite as" feature in the articles themselves). It also makes it
easier to actually find the article if one doesn't have a direct link.

So in many respects the issue number plays the role of the volume number
for other journals.

On the other hand, they explicitly say that the volume number is the
same as the year. Also, the issue number starts over at 1 every year,
whereas volume numbers (almost?) always continue to increase throughout
the life of the journal. (With issue and page numbers, there are two conventions. Sometimes the issue numbers start over at 1 with each new
volume, sometimes they just continue. Usually, page numbers continue throughout the issues within a volume, but sometimes they start over
with each issue, in which case the issue number is actually needed to
(quickly) find the article.)

Fortunately, BibTeX (which I still use despite the fact that some say
that it is obsolete and BibLaTeX is the best new thing) can take care of
all this automatically. I recently had occasion to create a new .bst
(BibTeX style) file. Anyone who has looked at one of these knows that
it is written in a rather low-level language and is thus hard to
understand. However, on most LaTeX systems one can just type "latex
makebst" and answer the questions and a .bst will be generated
automatically.

I suspect that traditional reference lists will be with us for a while
to come. I've seen some papers with, in addition to the traditional information, for each reference links to the DOI, the ADS entry, and the
arXiv entry (each of these might or might not exist for a given
article). Since the ADS bibcode has a standard format, it is possible
to generate it automatically from the information in a typical BibTeX
entry (at least if one uses the issue number for the volume number for
JCAP), and ADS has links to the DOI and arXiv if they exist, so it
should be possible to write a program which reads a BibTeX file and
updates it with those three new fields (DOI, ADS, and arXiv links),
retrieving them from ADS on the fly. Has anyone ever done this?

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In article <r6rnp5$1uou$1@gioia.aioe.org>,
"Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)" <helbig@asclothestro.multivax.de> writes:

ADS is not an official recommendation, but is to some extent a
de-facto standard.

I don't know of any IAU or AAS official standards; citation format
seems to be up to each journal. That means the same paper can be
cited different ways in different journals. In fact, one sees A&A in
some journals and Astr. Ap. in others. If the journal has its own
cls file, that should include a bibliography style.

As a practical matter, I'd see what ADS "export citation" produces
and use that if it's not ridiculous.

--
Help keep our newsgroup healthy; please don't feed the trolls.
Steve Willner Phone 617-495-7123 swillner@cfa.harvard.edu Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

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In article <r79t2f$6qd$1@dont-email.me>, willner@cfa.harvard.edu (Steve Willner) writes:

In article <r6rnp5$1uou$1@gioia.aioe.org>,
"Phillip Helbig (undress to reply)" <helbig@asclothestro.multivax.de> wr=

ites:

ADS is not an official recommendation, but is to some extent a
de-facto standard.

I don't know of any IAU or AAS official standards; citation format
seems to be up to each journal. That means the same paper can be
cited different ways in different journals. In fact, one sees A&A in
some journals and Astr. Ap. in others.

Right. Sometimes one even sees different forms for the same journal in
the same paper, but that is due to sloppiness on the part of the authors
and editors.

If the journal has its own
cls file, that should include a bibliography style.

Certainly.

But that concerns abbreviations and so on, whereas I was wondering about
the values of the citation "fields", independently of how they are
formatted.

As a practical matter, I'd see what ADS "export citation" produces
and use that if it's not ridiculous.

I'll give it a try, but presumably it will treat the issue number like a
volume number, given that that's how it's used in the bibcode.

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