Skip to content

BibTeX File Format

Jump to bottom
Sander Verdonschot edited this page Jul 3, 2020 · 2 revisions

A BibTeX file contains a number of publication entries, each of which has several fields containing the information for that entry. Any text outside of entries is ignored.

This page describes the standard BibTeX format, which can be used as input for Publy with a few small differences. The lists on this page are taken directly from BibTeXing, by Oren Patashnik.

Entries

Each entry corresponds to one publication. An entry is formatted as follows:

@type{name,
  field1={value1},
  field2={value2},
  ...
}

Each entry must start on a new line starting with an @. This is followed by the entry type and an opening brace {. From there, the entry may span as many lines as needed. The first word after the opening brace is the entry's name or identifier, which must be unique. Following that are the entry's fields, which hold the information of this publication.

Entry types

Entry types correspond to different kinds of publications, such as a masters thesis, a journal article, or a paper in conference proceedings. Publy supports all standard BibTeX entry types. Each type has certain fields that are required and others that are optional. If an entry is missing a required field, Publy will issue an error for that entry and not process it further. Any field that is not optional or required is ignored.

The full list of supported types with their required and optional fields follows. An overview of all the fields can be found below.

  • article - An article from a journal or magazine. Required fields: author, title, journal, year. Optional fields: volume, number, pages, month, note.
  • book - A book with an explicit publisher. Required fields: author or editor, title, publisher, year. Optional fields: volume or number, series, address, edition, month, note.
  • booklet - A work that is printed and bound, but without a named publisher or sponsoring institution. Required field: title. Optional fields: author, howpublished, address, month, year, note.
  • conference - The same as inproceedings.
  • inbook - A part of a book, which may be a chapter (or section or whatever) and/or a range of pages. Required fields: author or editor, title, chapter and/or pages, publisher, year. Optional fields: volume or number, series, type, address, edition, month, note.
  • incollection - A part of a book having its own title. Required fields: author, title, booktitle, publisher, year. Optional fields: editor, volume or number, series, type, chapter, pages, address, edition, month, note.
  • inproceedings - An article in a conference proceedings. Required fields: author, title, booktitle, year. Optional fields: editor, volume or number, series, pages, address, month, organization, publisher, note.
  • manual - Technical documentation. Required field: title. Optional fields: author, organization, address, edition, month, year, note.
  • mastersthesis - A Master's thesis. Required fields: author, title, school, year. Optional fields: type, address, month, note.
  • misc - Use this type when nothing else fits. Required fields: none. Optional fields: author, title, howpublished, month, year, note.
  • phdthesis - A PhD thesis. Required fields: author, title, school, year. Optional fields: type, address, month, note.
  • proceedings - The proceedings of a conference. Required fields: title, year. Optional fields: editor, volume or number, series, address, month, organization, publisher, note.
  • techreport - A report published by a school or other institution, usually numbered within a series. Required fields: author, title, institution, year. Optional fields: type, number, address, month, note.
  • unpublished - A document having an author and title, but not formally published. Required fields: author, title, note. Optional fields: month, year.

Fields

All information (besides the identifier) of each entry is contained in fields, such as title, or author. The value corresponding to each field is given in one of three ways: enclosed in braces (field={value}), enclosed in quotation marks (field="value"), or not enclosed at all (field=value). Generally, the first form gives the most freedom when using special characters. The following is a full list of the standard fields.

  • address - Usually the address of the publisher or other type of institution. For major publishing houses, van Leunen recommends omitting the information entirely. For small publishers, on the other hand, you can help the reader by giving the complete address.
  • annote - An annotation. It is not used by the standard bibliography styles, but may be used by others that produce an annotated bibliography.
  • author - The name(s) of the author(s), in the format described in the LaTeX book.
  • booktitle - Title of a book, part of which is being cited. See the LaTeX book for how to type titles. For book entries, use the title field instead.
  • chapter - A chapter (or section or whatever) number.
  • crossref - The database key of the entry being cross referenced.
  • edition - The edition of a book--for example, Second. This should be an ordinal, and should have the first letter capitalized, as shown here; the standard styles convert to lower case when necessary.
  • editor - Name(s) of editor(s), typed as indicated in the LaTeX book. If there is also an author field, then the editor field gives the editor of the book or collection in which the reference appears.
  • howpublished - How something strange has been published. The first word should be capitalized.
  • institution - The sponsoring institution of a technical report.
  • journal - A journal name.
  • month - The month in which the work was published or, for an unpublished work, in which it was written.
  • note - Any additional information that can help the reader. The first word should be capitalized.
  • number - The number of a journal, magazine, technical report, or of a work in a series. An issue of a journal or magazine is usually identified by its volume and number; the organization that issues a technical report usually gives it a number; and sometimes books are given numbers in a named series.
  • organization - The organization that sponsors a conference or that publishes a manual.
  • pages - One or more page numbers or range of numbers, such as 42-111 or 7,41,73-97 or 43+ (the "+" in this last example indicates pages following that don't form a simple range).
  • publisher - The publisher's name.
  • school - The name of the school where a thesis was written.
  • series - The name of a series or set of books. When citing an entire book, the the title field gives its title and an optional series field gives the name of a series or multi-volume set in which the book is published.
  • title - The work's title, typed as explained in the LaTeX book.
  • type - The type of a technical report--for example, Research Note.
  • volume - The volume of a journal or multivolume book.
  • year - The year of publication or, for an unpublished work, the year it was written. Generally it should consist of four numerals, such as 1984, although the standard styles can handle any "year" whose last four non-punctuation characters are numerals, such as (about 1984).
Clone this wiki locally