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I have found one source which is a collection which contains several hundreds of subsections with easily 100 authors I presume. It's a textbook on synthetic material.

The bean counter I am, I initially tried to incorporate every single author of every (sub)(sub)section of the book because unfortunately Springer, the publisher, only listed the authors for each chapter. The DOI import does not work on any level below. Just to make it clear for everyone's sanity: I only cited the collection so far and do not intend to work in the other authors by hand.

If you were to take on the task to simply enter any info of every author for his/hers contribution into your literature database (not your paper/essay's or thesis' bibliography), how would you do that? Note it all down by hand in your favorite literature management software or do you have some tricks?

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    One common way to deal with this is to treat each separately authored section as a distinct source, and then cite only the specific ones that you refer to. Of course, this is a lot easier each section has its own DOI and its own entry in your favorite bibliographic database.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Mar 10, 2014 at 16:49
  • Just so I get this correctly: You want to somewhat get a digital list of every author involved in your publication? In that case I would say that this strongly depends on what data you have available in what format.
    – Wrzlprmft ♦
    Mar 11, 2014 at 14:26
  • Yes. And yes, of course. :)
    – henry
    Mar 11, 2014 at 14:37
  • @henry: If you agree that this strongly depends on the available information and you hardly say what information you have, let alone what the publication in question is, how do you expect anybody to answer your question?
    – Wrzlprmft ♦
    Mar 11, 2014 at 15:29
  • In my humble opinion: you misunderstood. @NateEldredge apparently pretty much understood what I meant from the get-go. The question relates to the sheer amount of data that one might have to incorporate. So my inquiry is about if anyone knows any tricks to work it in as painless and quick as possible.
    – henry
    Mar 11, 2014 at 17:04

1 Answer 1

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In most cases, one of the following possibilities would be appropriate:

  • Cite the whole book, e.g., like this:

    A. Smith and B. Doe (editors.), Recent Advances on Synthetic Materials (Springer, New York, 2014)

    Your citation manager should provide a data type for this (in BibTeX this is BOOK). In this case, you only give the editors and not every single author.

    You should only cite a whole collection for purposes of providing a broader scope for your work, e.g., in the introduction.

  • Cite one article, e.g., like this:

    C. Foo and D. Bar, Synthetic Materials and You, in Recent Advances on Synthetic Materials, edited by A. Smith and B. Doe (Springer, New York, 2014), pp. 123–145.

    Again, your citation manager should provide a data type for this (in BibTeX this is INCOLLECTION). In this case you give the authors of the relevant section and the editors (depending on the journal style).

    This is what you should do if you are referencing a result or similar from an article in this collection.

If you were to take on the task to incorporate every author for his/hers contribution, how would you do that?

Even if I somewhat came to the conclusion that (contrary to the above) citing every author were appropriate, I would not implement this, simply because no journal, supervisor, etc. will print or accept such a citation and it would be a waste of time.

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  • Thank you for your reply. I think there might be a misunderstanding in what I was asking for, hence I clarified my op. I was inquiring about the task that is data maintenance because of the specific implications of such textbooks.
    – henry
    Mar 11, 2014 at 13:37

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