I personally use keys that mirror a traditional author-year citation style, e.g. This rule protects you from accidentally duplicating a reference in the Bibtex file and referring to it under two different keys. Ideally, you should be able to guess the key from looking at the reference.
This conversion can be switched off by enclosing the words not to be converted into an extra pair of braces, like so: title = command in your Latex file.) Most importantly, it is a good idea to have a systematic approach to choosing keys. For example, the title “A review of HIV biology” will be typeset as “A review of hiv biology”. This convention has the unfortunate side effect that proper nouns or acronyms, which should be capitalized, will be converted into lower-case as well. Bibtex enforces this capitalization rule by automatically converting everything in the article title field to lower-case. In a nutshell, this means that all words except the first one, proper nouns, and acronyms are spelled in lower case (see e.g. 1 The following sections address some of the most common issues that I see in daily Bibtex use.Īrticle titles in a reference list should be capitalized in sentence case. All bibliography managers that automatically generate Bibtex entries mess things up.Ī corollary of the second law is that all Bibtex entries need to be hand-curated to work correctly.My guidelines are shaped by the following two insights, which I call the first and second law of Bibtex: (This document is well worth the read for anybody using bibtex with some regularity.) To help ordinary mortals succeed with using Bibtex, I’m providing here a set of best practices and useful guidelines that help you steer clear of the worst pitfalls of Bibtex. In fact, the most complete description of bibtex’s inner workings is aptly called Tame the BeaST. It uses an awkward database format for storing bibliographic entries and an atrocious, poorly-documented programming language for describing how bibliographic entries should be formatted. Bibtex is an archaic program, written 30 years ago by a graduate student and never substantively changed or updated since. I have also rarely met anybody who could use it without messing up their bibliography in some way. I have used it for 20 years, I have written over 100 papers with it, and I think it works really well. Bibtex is the reference manager for Latex.
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