Organization

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About the BAS • History of the BAS • Scope Notes • Fast-track Journal List • Subject Classification of the BAS • Organization of BAS Entries • Acknowledgments

Organization of the BAS Entries

A single bibliographical entry in the BAS can contain as many as fifty fields of information. A brief explanation of the most important ones is as follows:

Type of material—article; book; or a chapter within an edited volume, conference proceedings, anthology or Festschrift
Author(s)—Only the first three authors are cited. Furthermore, whenever there are more than three authors, only the first one is cited by name, e.g., Smith, John, et al.
Indication of the author's role—whether the person named is an author or rather a compiler, an editor, and/or a translator
Title and subtitle of the article, book, or chapter
Title gloss—Set in brackets, the title gloss consists of a short statement intended to clarify the title, provide brief information about the publication, or spell out an acronym within the title
Title of the edited volume, conference proceedings, anthology or Festschrift in which the chapter appears (known as "analytic entry")
Title of the periodical in which an article appears, followed by its place of publication and the volume and/or issue number of the periodical (known as "journal details")
Place and publisher—in the case of a book or edited volume, etc.
Year of publication of the periodical, book, or edited volume, etc.
Collation of the article, book or chapter—e.g. "272p.", "37-56"
Series statement for the book (whenever applicable)
Country(ies) with which the publication is primarily concerned
Subject field, based on the BAS Classification scheme—each entry may contain up to six subject headings
Keyword(s)
Language field—this will be activated in the future

For the current online version of the BAS, the following points should be kept in mind:

The entries that first appeared in the printed volumes of the BAS (1971-1991) abbreviated most periodical titles. With a few exceptions, those abbreviations have been expanded into full titles in the online BAS.
Only one country code was generally assigned to the entries that were produced before January 2000. If a publication dealt with two or more countries, the entry was classified under the name of the smallest geographical entity in which those countries are found. For example, an article about Cambodia and Laos was normally entered under "Indochina"; a book about Burma and Indonesia was entered under "Southeast Asia"; and a work about China, India and Vietnam was entered under "Asia". The online BAS has since expanded its assignment of country codes to a maximum of six individual countries.
The names of individual countries were not consistently entered in the printed volumes of the BAS: e.g., Cambodia/Kampuchea, Hongkong/Hong Kong, or Formosa/Taiwan. Most of those entries have been standardized for the online version of the BAS.
There are many inconsistencies in the ways in which indexers applied the BAS Classification scheme to the entries that they produced over a thirty year long period. With some exceptions, those entries have not been reclassified. Wherever possible, however, some consistency has been achieved in the online version of the BAS by altering the overall classification.