2 The biblioentry element

The biblioentry element wraps a bibliographic entry. It contains bibliographic information for a resource in raw form. It does not encode any formatting information, punctuation, or extraneous text. The contents of biblioentry need to provide enough information to generate inline references, notes, and a bibliography entry for that resource. Table 2.1, Required attributes on biblioentry shows the required attributes.1 Note that as of DocBook 5.1, the pubwork attribute is not valid in the DocBook schema (see Open Question 1).

Table 2.1 Required attributes on biblioentry
AttributeValuesNotes
xml:idValid XML ID
pubworkCurrent values allowed on pubwork, possibly expanded.Other possibilities are the existing role or typeof attributes. See Open Question 1.

Table 2.2, Child elements on biblioentry lists the child elements of biblioentry that these conventions affect.

Table 2.2 Child elements on biblioentry
ElementRequiredNotes
titleyesSee Section 4, Titles
abbrev, titleabbrev??See Section 4, Titles and Open Question 3.
subtitlenoSee Section 4, Titles
citetitledeprecatedUse title instead.
author, editor, othercredityesMay be better to group these elements under authorgroup. See Section 3, Authors and other contributors and Open Question 2.
publisherdependsI think this element should be required for certain publications, understanding that publisher is a broad category that may include traditional publishers, web sites, blogs, etc. However, there are situations where it isn't needed, for example for personal communications. See Section 6, Publisher information
pubdateyesSince the publication date is used in many places in most styles, it should be required, though stylesheets should be able to handle cases where it’s missing. I suggest requiring it to be in one of the following xs:date formats: date, gYear, or gYearMonth (YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM, and YYYY). See Open Question 7.
editionnoSee Open Question 9.
bibliosetnoUsed to describe an enclosing resource. For example, if you are referencing a journal article, the complete biblioentry would be for that article, but there would be a biblioset child element that would describe the journal that includes the article. See Section 5, biblioset.
Other elementsnoThe citebiblioid and citerefentry elements don’t seem to have a role to play in a biblioentry. The person, personblurb, and personname elements are better used as children of author, editor, or othercredit, rather than directly under biblioentry. See Section 3, Authors and other contributors.