BibTeX Entry Types
The following are the standard entry types, along with their required and optional fields, that are used by the standard bibliography styles. The fields within each class (required or optional) are listed in order of occurrence in the output, except that a few entry types may perturb the order slightly, depending on what fields are missing. These entry types are similar to those adapted by Brian Reid from the classification scheme of van Leunen [1] for use in the Scribe system. The meanings of the individual fields are explained in the next section. Some nonstandard bibliography styles may ignore some optional fields in creating the reference. Remember that, when used in the bib
file, the entry-type name is preceded by an @ character.
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, included for Scribe compatibility.
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.
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.
Fields
Below is a description of all fields recognized by the standard bibliography styles. An entry can also contain other fields, which are ignored by those styles.
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.
For proceedings and inproceedings entry types, address specifies where a conference was held, rather than the address of the publisher or organization.
Optional in: book, booklet, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, manual, mastersthesis, phdthesis, proceedings, techreport.
annote
An annotation. It is not used by the standard bibliography styles, but may be used by others that produce an annotated bibliography.
Always optional.
author
The name(s) of the author(s), in the person names format.
Required in: article, book, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, mastersthesis, phdthesis, techreport, unpublished.
Optional in: booklet, manual, misc.
booktitle
Title of a book, part of which is being cited. See the capitalization of titles for how to type titles. For book entries, use the title field instead.
Required in: incollection, inproceedings.
chapter
A chapter (or section or whatever) number.
Required in: inbook.
Optional in: incollection.
crossref
The database key of the entry being cross referenced.
Always optional.
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.
Optional in: book, inbook, incollection, manual.
editor
Name(s) of editor(s), typed as indicated in the person names format. If there is also an author field, then the editor field gives the editor of the book or collection in which the reference appears.
Optional in: incollection, inproceedings, proceedings.
howpublished
How something strange has been published. The first word should be capitalized.
institution
The sponsoring institution of a technical report.
Required in: techreport.
journal
A journal name. Abbreviations are provided for many journals; see the Local Guide.
Required in: article.
key
Used for alphabetizing, cross referencing, and creating a label when the “author” information is missing. This field should not be confused with the key that appears in the \cite command and at the beginning of the database entry.
Always optional.
month
The month in which the work was published or, for an unpublished work, in which it was written.
You should use the standard three-letter abbreviation for the month: jan, feb, …; typed without braces or quotes. For example:
month = aprThe bibliography style will expand the abbreviation as appropriate.
Optional in: article, book, booklet, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, manual, mastersthesis, misc, phdthesis, proceedings, techreport, unpublished.
note
Any additional information that can help the reader. The first word should be capitalized.
Required in: unpublished.
Optional in: article, book, booklet, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, manual, mastersthesis, misc, phdthesis, proceedings, techreport.
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.
Optional in: article, book, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, proceedings, techreport.
organization
The organization that sponsors a conference or that publishes a manual.
Optional in: inproceedings, manual, proceedings.
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). To make it easier to maintain Scribe-compatible databases, the standard styles convert a single dash (as in 7-33) to the double dash used in TeX to denote number ranges (as in 7--33).
Required in: inbook.
Optional in: article, incollection, inproceedings.
publisher
The publisher’s name.
Required in: book, inbook, incollection.
Optional in: inproceedings, proceedings.
school
The name of the school where a thesis was written.
Required in: mastersthesis, phdthesis.
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.
Optional in: book, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, proceedings.
title
The work’s title, typed as explained in capitalization of titles.
Required in: article, book, booklet, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, manual, mastersthesis, phdthesis, proceedings, techreport, unpublished.
Optional in: misc.
type
The type of a technical report—for example, “Research Note”.
The type of a part in a inbook or incollection reference—for example, “Chapter” or “Section”.
The type of a thesis—for example, “Bachelor’s Thesis”.
Optional in: inbook, incollection, mastersthesis, phdthesis, techreport.
volume
The volume of a journal or multivolume book.
Optional in: article, book, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, proceedings.
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 nonpunctuation characters are numerals, such as (about 1984).
Required in: article, book, inbook, incollection, inproceedings, mastersthesis, phdthesis, proceedings, techreport.
Optional in: booklet, manual, misc, unpublished.
Person Names Format
Multiple names in a single author or editor field are separated with the word ` and `, surrounded by spaces, and not enclosed in braces. For example:
author = {First Author and Second Author and Third Author}If you have too many names to list, you can end the list with and others; the standard styles appropriately append an “et al.”
The rest of this section concerns with the structure of a single name.
Each name consists of four parts: First, von, Last, and Jr; each part consists of a (possibly empty) list of name-tokens. The Last part will be nonempty if any part is, so if there’s just one token, it’s always a Last token.
Recall that Per Brinch Hansen’s name should be typed
"Brinch Hansen, Per"The First part of his name has the single token “Per”; the Last part has two tokens, “Brinch” and “Hansen”; and the von and Jr parts are empty. If you had typed
"Per Brinch Hansen"instead, BibTeX would (erroneously) think “Brinch” were a First-part token, just as “Paul” is a First-part token in “John Paul Jones”, so this erroneous form would have two First tokens and one Last token.
Here’s another example:
"Charles Louis Xavier Joseph de la Vall{\'e}e Poussin"This name has four tokens in the First part, two in the von, and two in the Last. Here BibTeX knows where one part ends and the other begins because the tokens in the von part begin with lower-case letters.
In general, it’s a von token if the first letter at brace-level 0 is in lower case. Since technically everything in a “special character” is at brace-level 0, you can trick BibTeX into thinking that a token is or is not a von token by prepending a dummy special character whose first letter past the TeX control sequence is in the desired case, upper or lower.
To summarize, BibTeX allows three possible forms for the name:
"First von Last"
"von Last, First"
"von Last, Jr, First"You may almost always use the first form; you shouldn’t if either there’s a Jr part, or the Last part has multiple tokens but there’s no von part.
Capitalization of Titles
The bibliography style determines whether or not a title is capitalized; the titles of books usually are, the title of articles usually are not. You type a title the way it should appear if it is capitalized (you should capitalize everything but articles and unstressed conjunctions and prepositions, and even these should be capitalized as the first word or the first after a colon):
title = {The Agony and the Ecstasy}BibTeX will change uppercase letters to lowercase if appropriate. Uppercase letters that should not be changed are enclosed in braces. The following two titles are equivalent; the “A” of “Africa” will not be made lowercase.
"The Gnats and Gnus of {Africa}"
"The Gnats and Gnus of {A}frica"“Author” Information
Here’s a more complete description of the “author” information referred to in previous sections. For most entry types the “author” information is simply the author field. However: For the book and inbook entry types it’s the author field, but if there’s no author then it’s the editor field; for the manual entry type it’s the author field, but if there’s no author then it’s the organization field; and for the proceedings entry type it’s the editor field, but if there’s no editor then it’s the organization field.
When creating a label, the alpha style uses the “author” information described above, but with a slight change—for the manual and proceedings entry types, the key field takes precedence over the organization field. Here’s a situation where this is useful.
organization = "The Association for Computing Machinery",
key = "ACM"Without the key field, the alpha style would make a label from the first three letters of information in the organization field; alpha knows to strip off the The, but it would still form a label like ‘[Ass86]’, which, however intriguing, is uninformative. Including the key field, as above, would yield the better label ‘[ACM86]’.
You won’t always need the key field to override the organization, though: With
organization = "Unilogic, Ltd.",for instance, the alpha style would form the perfectly reasonable label ‘[Uni86]’.
Why and what is this?
Although BibTeX is widely used among the whole of the LaTeX community, a lot of people we tend to have problems figuring out exactly how are we supposed to type the entries in our bib files in order for BibTeX to understand them properly.
Perhaps part of the problem is that the official manual, BibTeXing from Oren Patashnik [2], is: not self-contained (points to external information on the LaTeX Book); and not very well organized (starts with a list of changes that assume you already know what BibTeX is about, and important details are often buried in hints or comments near the end of the document).
This document is an attempt to bring together the most relevant pieces of information that define the BibTeX format. Most of the content is lifted directly from the original manual, with some reordering of sections, and a few amendments (highlighted like this in green color) that complement the original text with additional details to be found elsewhere (in the manual itself or at external references).
Note, however, that this does not contain the full documentation of BibTeX. Details and additional features that weren’t deemed relevant for the most casual use have been left out. If in doubt, consult the original manual.
For convenience, this electronic document is also scattered with internal links that, hopelly, will be useful to quickly navigate and find the particular piece of information that you were looking for.
References
[1] Mary-Claire van Leunen. A Handbook for Scholars. Knopf, 1979.
[2] Oren Patashnik. BibTeXing. February 1988.