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.

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
Furthermore, the following aliases may be defined:

List of Field Names
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 "\&".

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}}