Bibtex4Word - BibTeX Database
Contents: Introduction -
Publication Types - Fields -
Entering Names - Strings -
Special Characters
Introduction
A BibTeX database stores information about published references in a file
having the extension .bib. It is possible to edit the
database file directly with a text editor but much easier to use a database
manager such as Jabref. In this
section I give an incomplete description of how to enter references aimed at
those who are unfamiliar with BibTeX. If you know enough to disagree with
anything I say, you know enough to make up your own mind.
More complete descriptions of how to use BibTeX are available online:
- Wikipedia has an entry on
BibTeX.
- "BibTeX
Tips and FAQ" has a list of helpful tips for using BibTeX.
- "Tame
the Beast" is a 45 page description that explains everything about
BibTeX including how the style files work. Part 3 of the document describes
the database entries in great detail.
- "How
to use the IEEEtran BibTeX Style" explains one particular style used for
electronic engineering publications. This style supports four new types of
publication that most other styles cannot yet cope with: electronic, patent,
periodical and standard.
- "Customizing
Bibliographic Style Files" explains how to create your own Bibtex style
if, for some reason, you are unsatisfied with any of the hundreds that exist
already.
Publication Types
A BibTeX database file contains an entry for each publication and can
contain hundreds of separate entries. Some people have different database files
for different topic areas while others, including me, find it more convenient to have one
massive file
containing all the publications they have ever looked at.
Each entry can be any one of nineteen different publication types. The most
useful of these are
- article
- a paper published in a journal
- book
- used for a book. This can be either an "authored book" written entirely
by a single group of authors or else and "edited book" with different
authors for each chapter.
- inbook
- a chapter or other section of an authored book
- incollection
- a chapter of an edited book
- inproceedings
- a paper presented at a conference
To add a new entry in JabRef, you click the "+"
button and then select which entry type to use. If you make a mistake, you can
change the entry type later by right clicking on an entry and selecting
Change entry type.
Fields
Information about each entry is given in different fields of which the most
important are listed below. Do read through this list at least once because some
of the information is non-obvious and changing it all after entering loads of
references is a great nuisance.
- bibtexkey
- is a short name that is used to refer to a publication within BibTeX and
does not usually appear in the bibliography or citation. Each entry must have
a unique bibtexkey that is different from all others in the database and must
not contain spaces or any of the following ten characters: "@',\#}{~%. My
preference is to use the last name of the first author followed by the date of
publication and, if necessary to make it distinct, a letter a to z. An example
of this would be "Einstein1905a".
- author
- A list of author names with the word "and" between each,
e.g. John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley and James Bradley. You can have as many authors as
you like. If you get bored, you can end the list with "and others" but it is
best to enter all the names. You should put in their full names (as they
themselves like to be called) and let the BibTeX style choose whether to abbreviate them
by using only their initials (e.g. styles abbrv or
abbrvnat).
- editor
- A list of editor names for "edited books" and, occasionally, for
conferences. As with the author list, multiple editors are separated by the
word "and".
- title
- gives the name of the article, chapter or book. For books, you should also
complete the booktitle field with the same information in order to make cross
references work correctly. BibTeX ignores any capitalization in the title
field and each BibTeX style imposes its own capitalization scheme. If you put
braces around any acronyms as in "The {NATO} Organization" then the capitals
within the braces will be left alone.
- booktitle
- should be the same as the title field for books. For inproceedings types,
it should be the proceedings of the conference e.g. "Proc. International
Juggling Convention". You should include a period after abbreviations
unless they include the final letter of the word being abbreviated.
- journal
- gives the name of the journal containing an article
- volume
- gives the volume number for a journal
- number
- academic journals usually publish several issues in a year which make up
one "volume"; this field gives the issue number within the volume.
- pages
- gives the range of page numbers in the form "23-56".
- year
- gives the year as a 4-digit number.
- month
- gives the month. In JabRef, this should always be entered as a 3 letter
lower-case abbreviation surrounded by hash signs, e.g. #jan#. The BibTeX style
will convert this into the appropriate form for the bibliography.
- address
- for inproceedings entries, it is normal to give the name of the city
that hosted the conference. For book entries, some people like to include the
publisher's city.
- crossref
- for the inbook and incollection types of publication, you should first
make an entry for the complete book and then type its bibtexkey in the
crossref field of any inbook and
incollection entries that refer to part of
the book. It is
then not necessary to re-enter any information (e.g. publisher and date of
publication) that is the same for all sections of the book.
- doi
- a short string, looking something like 10.1109/CVPR.2006.95, that uniquely
identifies a publication and that is guaranteed by the publisher never to
change. Several styles (e.g. plainnat,
abbrvnat) will convert this into a
clickable hyperlink if the d style flag is specified.
- url
- a web link pointing to the publication. These are not as good as doi links
because they often change over time.
- isbn
- gives the ISBN number for a book.
Entering Names
There are three ways of entering names which are distinguished by the number
of commas included (zero, one or two):
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Eisenhower, Dwight D.
- Davis, Jr., Sammy
You need to use the last form for names that include a suffix like "Jr." but
otherwise, I prefer the first. Initials should be followed by a period
and a space, i.e. write "J. B. Priestly" rather than "JB
Priestly" or "J.B.Priestly". Aristocratic names
should be written "Ludwig van Beethoven" or "van
Beethoven, Jr., Ludwig" if they also have a "Jr."
suffix.
BibTeX does not deal properly with names in which the family name comes
first. These should be surrounded with braces as in "{Mao Zedong}" in
order to ensure that their order is not reversed and that the family name is
used when sorting the list of authors.
Strings
Jabref allows you to define strings that can abbreviate commonly used
journal names. Click BibTeX>>Edit Strings>>+ to enter a new abbreviation e.g. "IJFC"
for the "Proc. International Juggling Federation
Convention". Once defined, you can enter #IJFC#
instead of the full name which is quicker and saves spelling errors.
Special Characters
Bibtex4Word can generate non-standard characters in several different ways.
Most of these are illustrated in the document "SpecialCharacters.doc"
that is included in the Bibtex4Word distribution.
- The easiest way is to save your BibTeX file using
UTF-8 encoding (this can be
set in the Jabref preferences dialog) and specify the p
style flag so that Bibtex4Word reads it correctly.
- Non-standard characters that are available in your locale's
ANSI code page will be reproduced correctly
if the p style flag is omitted or if
0p is specified. These can be entered from your keyboard by typing
ALT+0xxx where xxx is the
decimal character code that you want in the range 129 to 255. Code page 1252
is the Western European standard and is illustrated in the examples in "SpecialCharacters.doc".
- Many characters have special "escape sequences" defined in LaTeX. Thus, "\infty"
will create an infinity symbol. Bibtex4Word will correctly interpret most but
not all of the sequences shown
here.
- Accents on letters also have special "escape sequences" which are listed
here. For reasons that are explained
here, you need to enclose accented characters in names and titles within
braces e.g. "{\"a}" for an a with an umlaut or
within double braces to protect them from case changes in titles e.g. "{{\"A}}".
- Mathematical formulae are enclosed in braces and $ signs and use _ and ^
for subscript and superscript respectively: "{$a^2+b^2=c^2$}".
- Unicode characters can be entered
with the escape sequence "\unichar{xxx}" where
xxx is the decimal code for a character.
This page is part of the Bibtex4Word
documentation. Copyright © 2006-2013 Mike Brookes, Imperial
College, London, UK. See the file gfl.html for copying
instructions. Please send any comments or suggestions to "mike.brookes" at
"imperial.ac.uk".
Updated: $Id: b4w_bibtex.html 7349 2016-01-10 18:00:43Z dmb $