LaTeX Bibliography Entries
LaTeX use bib files to store bibliography entries. These entries are formatted using a bst file, and inserted in the biography section of a LaTeX document.
Contents
Types and Fields
Each entry in a bibliography has a given type (article, book, presentation, etc.) and each entry has multiple properties (author, title, year of publication, etc.).
List of Reference Types
| article | An article from a journal or magazine. |
| book | A book with an explicit publisher. |
| booklet | A work that is printed and bound, but without a named publisher or sponsoring institution. |
| inbook | A part of a book, which may be a chapter (or section or whatever) and/or a range of pages. |
| incollection | A part of a book having its own title. |
| inproceedings | An article in a conference proceedings. |
| manual | Technical documentation. |
| mastersthesis | A Master’s thesis. |
| misc | Use this type when nothing else fits. |
| phdthesis | A PhD thesis. |
| proceedings | The proceedings of a conference. |
| techreport | A report published by a school or other institution, usually numbered within a series. |
| unpublished | A document having an author and title, but not formally published. |
| presentation | Presentation or poster at a conference (non-standard type!) |
Furthermore, the following aliases may be defined:
| commented | Alias of misc |
| conference | Alias of inproceedings |
| electronic | Alias of misc |
| glossdef | Alias of misc |
| jurthesis | Alias of misc |
| periodical | Alias of misc |
| url | Alias of misc |
| webpage | Alias of misc |
List of Field Names
| Author | Author(s) of a publication |
| Title | Title of the publication |
| Editor | Editor of the encompassing publication. If author is not defined, editor is used as the author. |
| Booktitle | Title of the encompassing publication. |
| Journal | Name of the journal. Semantically equivalent to booktitle. |
| Volume | Volume of the series. Typically, the year of issue. |
| Number | Number of the series, often within a year. If Volume is not defined, the value of number is taken in place. |
| Series | The name of the series of a book. |
| Type | Type of publication, as sofar that was not defined by the reference type. Semantically equivalent to Howpublished. |
| Howpublished | Type of publication, as sofar that was not defined by the reference type. Semantically equivalent to Type. |
| Eid | Electronic identifier of the publications. More or less equivalent to DOI. |
| Chapter | The chapter number. |
| Pages | The pages within the encompassing publication. |
| Organization | The organization responsible for the publication, typically the employer or organizing institute. Please be aware of the American spelling. Organisation is wrong and is not recognized. |
| Institution | The organization responsible for the publication. Semantically equivalent to organization, but used for tech reports only. |
| School | The school responsible for the publication. Semantically equivalent to organization, but used for thesis only. |
| Publisher | The publisher. |
| Address | Address, either that of the publisher or that of the conference. |
| Edition | The edition of a book. |
| Month | Month of publication. |
| Year | Year of publication. |
| Isbn | ISBN number of the book. |
| Issn | ISSN number of the magazine. |
| Doi | Digital identifier for articles. |
| Url | URI where the article can be donwloaded. If you publish a URL in a scientific paper, make sure that the URL will never change. |
| Note | Notes about the publication which will be published in the bibliography. |
| Key | The identifying key for each entry. Non-standard field. |
| Annote | Annotation to the article. Non-standard field. |
Other fields exists, such as Urldate, Abstract, Description, and Keywords. However, there are mostly used for managing large Bibliography collections and are not printed in the LaTeX document.
Be aware that some styles and packages are picky on the syntax in your Bibliography file, so make sure to use the correct capitalization of "Howpublished" (not "HowPublished"), and use proper LaTeX. In particular, make sure you write "&" as "\&".
Displayed Fields Per Reference Type
Layout Using BST files
Everyone has their own preferences on the layout and sorting of the bibliography. At some point, you want to create your own style file (.bst file). Instead of writing it by hand, create one using the custom-bib package. Simply download the package, and run:
latex makebst
This will ask you a bunch of questions and outputs a .bst or .dbj file for you. If you only got a dbj file, generate the bst file using:
latex mystyle.dbj
If you want further customization, you can proceed from there. Just don't waste your time implementing variants which merlin (the script in the custom-bib package) can make for you.
Use Proper Capitalization of Titles
The LaTeX default styles automatically convert the casing of titles (e.g. "Article on Something Important" becomes "Article on something important"). If you dislike this, simply create you own custom style with custom-bib / merlin, and turn this feature off.
Create a Style for Conference Presentations or Posters
I like to refer to presentations at conferences, but there is no default reference entry for this. There is an extension, presentation, which is supported by Merlin, but that does not allow me to add the conference name for the poster or oral presentation.
In line with the inproceeding or conference (conference is just an alias of inproceeding) reference type, I put the name of the conference in the booktitle field, and the location of the conference in the address field. I put either 'Poster' or 'Presentation' in the Howpublished field. Since neither publishes Unfortunately, there is no reference type which both displays the booktitle and the howpublished field.
My solution was to modify the inproceeding reference type to include the Howpublished field, if it is present.
Make DOIs clickable
DOIs are unique identifiers for article publications. Often, the only link I have for an article is to the publishers site, and is based on the DOI. All DOIs have a easily link. For example, the article with DOI 10.1016/j.future.2008.07.002 can be accessed at the link http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2008.07.002.
It is rather easy to make DOIs clickable by redefining the \doi command. You can put this line anywhere before you call \thebibliograpy or \bibliography.
\providecommand{\doi}[1]{\discretionary{}{}{}\href{http://dx.doi.org/#1}{doi:#1}}
