BibTeX

Name	BibTeX
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Author	Oren Patashnik, Leslie Lamport
Developer	Oren Patashnik
Released
Latest release version	0.99d
Latest release date
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Programming language	WEB
Platform	Cross-platform
Language	English
Status	Maintained

BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as $\{\backslash mathrm\{B\{\backslash scriptstyle\{IB\}\}\; \backslash !\; T\backslash !\_\{\backslash displaystyle\; E\}\; \backslash !\; X\}\}$.

BibTeX makes it easy to cite sources in a consistent manner, by separating bibliographic information from the presentation of this information, similarly to the separation of content and presentation/style supported by LaTeX itself.

Basic structure

In the words of the program's author: "Here's how BibTEX works. It takes as input

(a) an .aux file produced by LaTEX on an earlier run;

(b) a .bst file (the style file), which specifies the general reference-list style and specifies how to format individual entries, and which is written by a style designer [..] in a special-purpose language [..], and

(c) .bib file(s) constituting a database of all reference-list entries the user might ever hope to use.

BibTEX chooses from the .bib file(s) only those entries specied by the .aux file (that is, those given by LaTEX's \cite or \nocite commands), and creates as output a .bbl file containing these entries together with the formatting commands specified by the .bst file [..]. LaTEX will use the .bbl file, perhaps edited by the user, to produce the reference list."

History and reimplementations

BibTeX was created by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport in 1985. It is written in WEB/Pascal. Version 0.98f was released in March 1985. With version 0.99c of February 1988, a stationary state was reached for 22 years. In March 2010, version 0.99d was released, and further releases were announced.

During Patashnik's inactivity 1988-2010, several reimplementations were published:

BibTeXu is a reimplementation of bibtex (by Yannis Haralambous and his students) that supports the UTF-8 character set.

bibtex8 is a reimplementation of bibtex that supports 8-bit character sets.

CL-BibTeX is a completely compatible reimplementation of bibtex in Common Lisp, capable of using bibtex .bst files directly or converting them into human-readable Lisp .lbst files. CL-BibTeX supports Unicode in Unicode Lisp implementations, using any character set that Lisp knows about.

BibLatex is a complete reimplementation. "It redesigns the way in which LaTeX interacts with BibTeX at a fairly fundamental level. With biblatex, BibTeX is only used to sort the bibliography and to generate labels. Instead of being implemented in BibTeX's style files, the formatting of the bibliography is entirely controlled by TeX macros."

Bibliographic information file

BibTeX uses a style-independent text-based file format for lists of bibliography items, such as articles, books, and theses. BibTeX bibliography file names usually end in .bib.

Bibliography entries each contain some subset of standard data entries:

address: Publisher's address (usually just the city, but can be the full address for lesser-known publishers)

annote: An annotation for annotated bibliography styles (not typical)

author: The name(s) of the author(s) (in the case of more than one author, separated by and)

booktitle: The title of the book, if only part of it is being cited

chapter: The chapter number

crossref: The key of the cross-referenced entry

edition: The edition of a book, long form (such as "first" or "second")

editor: The name(s) of the editor(s)

eprint: A specification of an electronic publication, often a preprint or a technical report

howpublished: How it was published, if the publishing method is nonstandard

institution: The institution that was involved in the publishing, but not necessarily the publisher

journal: The journal or magazine the work was published in

key: A hidden field used for specifying or overriding the alphabetical order of entries (when the "author" and "editor" fields are missing). Note that this is very different from the key (mentioned just after this list) that is used to cite or cross-reference the entry.

month: The month of publication (or, if unpublished, the month of creation)

note: Miscellaneous extra information

number: The "(issue) number" of a journal, magazine, or tech-report, if applicable. (Most publications have a "volume", but no "number" field.)

organization: The conference sponsor

pages: Page numbers, separated either by commas or double-hyphens.

publisher: The publisher's name

school: The school where the thesis was written

series: The series of books the book was published in (e.g. "The Hardy Boys" or "Lecture Notes in Computer Science")

title: The title of the work

type: The type of tech-report, for example, "Research Note"

url: The WWW address

volume: The volume of a journal or multi-volume book

year: The year of publication (or, if unpublished, the year of creation)

In addition, each entry contains a key that is used to cite or cross-reference the entry. This key is the first item in a BibTeX entry, and is not part of any field.

Entry types

Bibliography entries included in a .bib file are split by types. The following types are understood by virtually all BibTeX styles: ; article: An article from a journal or magazine.Required fields: author, title, journal, yearOptional fields: volume, number, pages, month, note, key ; book: A book with an explicit publisher.Required fields: author/editor, title, publisher, yearOptional fields: volume, series, address, edition, month, note, key ; booklet: A work that is printed and bound, but without a named publisher or sponsoring institution.Required fields: titleOptional fields: author, howpublished, address, month, year, note, key ; conference: The same as inproceedings, included for Scribe compatibility.Required fields: author, title, booktitle, yearOptional fields: editor, pages, organization, publisher, address, month, note, key ; inbook: A part of a book, usually untitled. May be a chapter (or section or whatever) and/or a range of pages.Required fields: author/editor, title, chapter/pages, publisher, yearOptional fields: volume, series, address, edition, month, note, key ; incollection: A part of a book having its own title.Required fields: author, title, booktitle, yearOptional fields: editor, pages, organization, publisher, address, month, note, key ; inproceedings: An article in a conference proceedings.Required fields: author, title, booktitle, yearOptional fields: editor, series, pages, organization, publisher, address, month, note, key ; manual: Technical documentation.Required fields: titleOptional fields: author, organization, address, edition, month, year, note, key ; mastersthesis: A Master's thesis.Required fields: author, title, school, yearOptional fields: address, month, note, key ; misc: For use when nothing else fits.Required fields: noneOptional fields: author, title, howpublished, month, year, note, key ; phdthesis: A Ph.D. thesis.Required fields: author, title, school, yearOptional fields: address, month, note, key ; proceedings: The proceedings of a conference.Required fields: title, yearOptional fields: editor, publisher, organization, address, month, note, key ; techreport: A report published by a school or other institution, usually numbered within a series.Required fields: author, title, institution, yearOptional fields: type, number, address, month, note, key ; unpublished: A document having an author and title, but not formally published.Required fields: author, title, noteOptional fields: month, year, key

Style files

BibTeX formats bibliographic items according to a style file, typically by generating TeX or LaTeX formatting commands. However, style files for generating HTML output also exist. BibTeX style files, for which the suffix .bst is common, are written in a simple, stack-based programming language (dubbed "BibTeX Anonymous Forth-Like Language", or "BAFLL", by Drew McDermott) that describes how bibliography items should be formatted. There are some packages which can generate .bst files automatically (like custom-bib or Bib-it).

Most journals or publishers that support LaTeX have a customized bibliographic style file for the convenience of the authors. This ensures that the bibliographic style meets the guidelines of the publisher with minimal effort.

Examples

A .bib file might contain the following entry, which describes a mathematical handbook: @Book{abramowitz+stegun, author = "Milton {Abramowitz} and Irene A. {Stegun}", title = "Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables", publisher = "Dover", year = 1964, address = "New York", edition = "ninth Dover printing, tenth GPO printing" }

If a document references this handbook, the bibliographic information may be formatted in different ways depending on which citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago etc.) is employed. The way LaTeX deals with this is by specifying \cite commands and the desired bibliography style in the LaTeX document. If the command \cite{abramowitz+stegun} appears inside a LaTeX document, the bibtex program will include this book in the list of references for the document and generate appropriate LaTeX formatting code. When viewing the formatted LaTeX document, the result might look like this:

: Abramowitz, Milton and Irene A. Stegun (1964), Handbook of mathematical functions with formulas, graphs, and mathematical tables. New York: Dover.

Depending on the style file, BibTeX may rearrange authors' last names, change the case of titles, omit fields present in the .bib file, format text in italics, add punctuation, etc. Since the same style file is used for an entire list of references, these are all formatted consistently with minimal effort required from authors or editors.

Author formatting

Last name prefixes such as von, van and der are handled automatically, provided they are in lower case to distinguish them from middle names. Multiple word last names are distinguished from first and middle names by placing the last names first, then a comma, then the first and middle names. Name suffixes such as Jr., Sr., and III are generally handled by using two comma separators as in the following example:

@Book{hicks2001, author = "von Hicks, III, Michael", title = "Design of a Carbon Fiber Composite Grid Structure for the GLAST Spacecraft Using a Novel Manufacturing Technique", publisher = "Stanford Press", year = 2001, address = "Palo Alto", edition = "1st,", isbn = "0-69-697269-4" }

If the author does not use a comma to separate the name suffix from the last name, then curly brackets {Hicks III} may be used instead.

Multiple authors should be separated with an and, not with commas:

@Book{Torre2008, author = "Joe Torre and Tom Verducci", publisher = "Doubleday", title = "The Yankee Years", year = 2008, isbn = "0385527403" }

Cross-referencing

BibTeX allows referring to other publications via the crossref field. In the following example the 'author:06' publication references to 'conference:06'. @INPROCEEDINGS {author:06, title = {Some publication title}, author = {First Author and Second Author}, crossref = {conference:06}, pages = {330—331}, } @PROCEEDINGS {conference:06, editor = {First Editor and Second Editor}, title = {Proceedings of the Xth Conference on XYZ}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Xth Conference on XYZ}, year = {2006}, month = oct, }

The referred entry must stand below the referring one. Remember to add booktitle to the proceedings entry in order to avoid 'empty booktitle' BibTex warning. The LaTeX output of this input might look like: :Author, First and Author, Second (October 2006), Some publication title, in: Proceedings of the Xth Conference on XYZ, pp 330-331.

Using more than one input file

Having more than one input file, it is recommended to use the command \bibliography only once and insert the various files separated by commas (and no spaces) inside the curly brackets. Example:

\bibliography{bibliography_1,bibliography_2,bibliography_3}

Uses

NASA Astrophysics Data System — The ADS is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers and provides BibTeX format citations.

ACL Anthology — A Digital Archive of Research Papers in Computational Linguistics.

BibSonomy — A social bookmark and publication management system based on BibTeX.

CiteSeer — An online database of research publications which can produce BibTeX format citations.

CiteULike — A community based bibliography database with BibTeX input and output.

The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies — uses BibTeX as internal data format, search results and contributions primarily in BibTeX.

Connotea — Open-source social bookmark style publication management system.

Digital Bibliography & Library Project - A bibliography website that lists more than 910,000 articles in the computer science field.

Google Scholar — Google's system for searching scholarly literature provides BibTeX format citations if you enable the option in 'Scholar Preferences'.

HubMed — A versatile PubMed interface including BibTeX output.

MathSciNet - Database by the American Mathematical Society (subscription), choose BibTeX in the "Select alternative format" box

Qiqqa - Provides a fully featured BibTeX editor and validator, along with tools for automatically populating BibTeX records for your PDFs.

refbase - Open source reference manager for institutional repositories and self archiving with BibTeX input and output.

RefTeX - Emacs based reference manager

SPIRES - The SPIRES High-Energy Physics literature database with BibTeX support.

Zotero - Firefox plugin with advanced features such as synchronization between different computers, social bookmarking, searching inside saved PDFs and BibTeX output.

See also

Citation style language

Comparison of reference management software

References

External links

BibTeXing. The original manual (1988) by the co-author of BibTeX, Oren Patashnik.

Managing Citations and Your Bibliography with BibTeX by Jürgen Fenn (The PracTeX Journal 2006, number 4).

BibTeX tutorial. Section from Getting to Grips with LaTeX tutorials.

The BibTeX Format. Description of the BibTeX format.

BibTeX in WinEdt

LaTex FAQ at Colorado University

*BibTeX and bibliography styles section of FAQ

*Bibliography style PDF, another relevant section of FAQ, an illustration of how several bibliographic styles render citations and reference entries

Tame the BeaST. Detailed explanation of the BibTeX format and how to write bst files.

CL-BibTeX. The CL-BibTeX web site.

biblatex -- The TeX Catalogue OnLine, Entry for biblatex, Ctan Edition. A LaTeX package that is a complete reimplementation of the bibliographic facilities provided by LaTeX in conjunction with BibTeX.

Category:BibTeX Category:Bibliography file formats