Better handling of multiple publishers

CSL Evolution
1

This is probably more for CSL 1.2 than for CSL 1.1, but anyway: The way multiple publishers are dealt with is not ideal. SBL Handbook of Style, p. 83 requires this formatting Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; Fribourg: Presses Universitaires, which is not possible with standard CSL. (CSL-M includes a “hack”, to quote @Frank_Bennett here.) Perhaps this requires a deeper change in the data model, like treating publisher and publisher-place as pairs, something like name parts.

2

For this scenario, could we not use

  • an empty original-date variable and
  • the place and name of the publisher to be listed first in original-publisher and original-publisher-place?

See the example and linked pull request in this post.

3

Nice. I guess that would work, but I still think publisher should probably be a name variable consisting of name and place. But in the meantime your solution looks very good.

4

For a personal workaround, original-publisher could work, but I’d generally like to avoid hacks like this in styles in the central CSL repository. One of CSL’s strengths over BibTeX is avoiding style-specific data entry. This workaround works for the case of 2 publishers, but doesn’t extend to more publishers.

I’ll also note that citeproc-js does have capability built in to separate publisher and publisher-place fields on a semicolon and re-join them if appropriate attributes from CSLm are set.

The best solution would be to get publisher as a name variable incorporated into the spec, processors, and clients. It would be worth aligning with processor maintainers on prioritizing for CSL 1.1 feature implementation.

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