BibTeX

From Evan Sultanik

BibTeX (pronounced /ˈbɪbtɛx/) is a bibliography formatting system intended to be used in conjunction with the typesetting system. BibTeX is often typeset as . Wikipedia has a fairly good overview of it here.

I've seen some very poorly formatted BibTeX files in my days. This happens so frequently that I've developed a stock list of guidelines that I E-mail out to offenders listing common mistakes and best practices. I've decided to make this list public, below.

1. The booktitle for an @inproceedings should almost always start with "Proceedings of the…"
2. The booktitle should never contain the year of the conference. For example, the following are all incorrect:
   • "2004 Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop"; and
   • "International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2006"
   • "IJCAI '08: The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
3. Never use an acronym or abbreviation in a bib entry (e.g., "AAMAS"), even if you are giving the acronym in addition to the full name. The only time when an acronym is perhaps admissible is if…
   • it is obvious (e.g., it is the same conference at which the paper itself is to be published);
   • you really need the space (in which case, if the acronym is used multiple times, try and define the acronym after its first use); and/or
   • it is the name of the conference at which an itinerant workshop was held.
4. Page and date ranges should always be given with an en-dash ("--"), without being surrounded by spaces.
   • "13-37" is incorrect.
   • "13 -- 37" is incorrect.
   • "13--37" is correct.
5. Text that you wish to remain capitalized (i.e., acronyms in titles) should be put in braces (e.g., "{DCOPolis}: a Framework for…"); nothing else should be put in braces.
6. Be consistent! For example, the way you write the name of a conference should be consistent over all citations from that conference.
7. Workshop papers should almost always be cited as @inproceedings, not @article.
8. NEVER SIMPLY COPY/PASTE CITATIONS FROM CITESEER/GOOGLE SCHOLAR. The BibTeX produced from the IEEE/ACM websites is often wrong, too.