Suppressing BibTeX fields for specific biblatex entry types

I use LaTeX for writing academic papers and biblatex for handling the citations and references in them. One problem I ran into is that biblatex prints out the location, address, month, and publisher for a lot of entries, which I prefer not to have in my reference list. Rather than editing the BibTeX .bib file and losing that data forever, you can tell biblatex to ignore or suppress specific pieces of it.

Below is my code. It suppresses location, address, month, etc. for all entries, and suppresses the publisher and editor field unless the entry is a book. You may need to modify this for whatever style you're using.

% Loads biblatex with clickable links from citations and the reference list, 
% with back references if the style supports them.
\usepackage[hyperref,doi,url=false,backref,style=alphabetic,maxbibnames=99]{biblatex}
\bibliography{refs.bib}

\AtEveryBibitem{% Clean up the bibtex rather than editing it
 \clearlist{address}
 \clearfield{date}
 \clearfield{eprint}
 \clearfield{isbn}
 \clearfield{issn}
 \clearlist{location}
 \clearfield{month}
 \clearfield{series}
 
 \ifentrytype{book}{}{% Remove publisher and editor except for books
  \clearlist{publisher}
  \clearname{editor}
 }
}

Edit on 2/9/2012: As @siretart helpfully points out in the comments, biblatex makes distinctions between fields, name lists, and literal lists in the source file. To see whether to use \clearfield, \clearname, or \clearlist check the biblatex manual for the data type. For example, date and series are fields, location is a literal list, and editor is a name list. I've updated the code above to reflect this.

Better APA-style: working around hyperref and apacite problems

I'm writing an article in LaTeX using APA style, so I'm using the popular
apa.cls style. It defaults to using apacite for citations and references, which works well enough.

But if I have a URL field in the BibTeX, like I always do in JabRef to remember where I found things, it prints it for each reference wasting a lot of space and not breaking lines properly. I also like the URLs I do show to be clickable hyperlinks, and my citations and cross-references as well. You can usually do this using hyperref, but a lot of things break when using apacite and hyperref together. Here's the top of the file:

\documentclass[jou]{apa}
\usepackage{hyperref}

And here is the output of pdflatex:

! Undefined control sequence.
\hyper@@link ->\let \Hy@reserved@a 
                                   \relax \@ifnextchar [{\hyper@link@ }{\hyp...
l.83 \cite{Aris09Visual}
...
! Argument of \@@cite has an extra }.
 
                \par 
l.83 \cite{Aris09Visual}
...
Runaway argument?
>{\hyper@link@ }\def \reserved@b {\hyper@link@ [link]}\futurelet \@let@token \E
TC.
! Paragraph ended before \@@cite was complete.
 
                   \par 
l.83 \cite{Aris09Visual}

Other people have had this problem before, but there aren't any great solutions. See the end for a good solution using biblatex-apa instead of apacite. If you insist on using apacite, there are instructions here for how to make things mostly work:

The simplest way to fix the problem is to put a single
instance of \protect into hyperref.sty.

Turn this:

   \def\bibcite#1#2{%
     \@newl at bel{b}{#1\@extra at binfo}{%
       \hyper@@link[cite]{}{cite.#1\@extra at b@citeb}{#2}%

into this:

   \def\bibcite#1#2{%
     \@newl at bel{b}{#1\@extra at binfo}{%
       \protect\hyper@@link[cite]{}{cite.#1\@extra at b@citeb}{#2}%

This occurs at
line 3972 in hyperref.sty [2007/02/07 v6.75r
and at
line 4939 in hyperref.sty [2008/04/05 v6.77l
(line 8328 of the corresponding hyperref.dtx ).

but this breaks the citations. Later they added additional code to the tex file:

It's really just a matter of executing APA's version of \bibcite
before doing the extra stuff that hyperref needs to create the hyper-linking (which seems to work just fine).

For example, the following coding seems to work OK.

\usepackage{apacite}
\let\APAbibcite\bibcite   %%%%  add this line

\usepackage{color}
\definecolor{darkblue}{rgb}{0.0,0.0,0.3}
\usepackage[bookmarks=true]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
   pdfauthor={Salvatore Enrico Indiogine},
   pdftitle={},
   pdfsubject={TAMU EDCI},
   pdfkeywords={},
   pdfcreator={LaTeX with hyperref package},
   pdfproducer={dvips + ps2pdf},
   colorlinks,breaklinks,
   linkcolor={darkblue},
   urlcolor={darkblue},
   anchorcolor={darkblue},
   citecolor={darkblue}}

%%%%  add the following 2 lines
\let\HYPERbibcite\bibcite
\def\bibcite#1#2{\APAbibcite{#1}{#2}\HYPERbibcite{#1}{#2}}

This fixes most problems, but there are still warnings and ampersands missing in the references.

A better solution for me was to use biblatex-apa with biblatex instead of apacite.

First replace \bibliography{...} at the end of your tex file with \printbibliography. Then modify the the top to look like this (note the noapacite option for apa.cls).

\documentclass[jou,noapacite]{apa} %%%% apacite is buggy with hyperref

\usepackage{color}

\usepackage[]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
   pdfauthor={AUTHORS},
   pdftitle={TITLE},
   pdfkeywords={KEYWORDS},
   colorlinks,breaklinks,
   linkcolor={blue},
   urlcolor={blue},
   anchorcolor={blue},
   citecolor={blue}}

%%%% bilatex-apa
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa,hyperref,doi,url]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
\bibliography{}

Importing BibTeX into Endnote

I recently downloaded a trial for Endnote, a proprietary reference manager. I wouldn't recommend it, especially for the price as free open-source alternatives like JabRef do a much better job at no cost. That, and I use LaTeX with BibTeX for my papers, and JabRef works much better with that. Another option that is more LaTeX friendly is the Mendeley beta. It looks better than JabRef, but doesn't have all the functionality and is definitely beta. The built-in pdf viewer isn't to good, either.

However, if you need to get references from BibTeX into Endnote, you can easily use JabRef to do so. First, open your .bib file in JabRef. Then, go to File->Export and select RIS (*.ris) as the file type. Save the export, then open up Endnote. Go to File->Import and choose the saved export. Pick Reference Manager (RIS) for the import options and hit Import. Viola!