BibTeX Guidelines

Original guide by Dániel Darvas.

In order to keep the bibliographies consistent, please use the following BibTeX rules.

• Type of the publication
  • @article iff the publication is a journal paper
    • Do not use it for conference papers, internal reports, Scientific Students' Competition papers, etc.
  • @inproceedings iff the publication is released in a conference proceedings, but not in LNCS
  • @incollection iff the publication is released in a collection, such as LNCS
  • @book iff the publication is an entire book
  • @techreport if the publication is a technical report
  • @phdthesis if the publication is a PhD thesis/dissertation
• author: the authors of the publication (mandatory)
  • Separate the authors with and: Szil\'ard Szerz\H o and Tam\'as T\'arsszerz\H o
  • Write full first names if possible (Szil\'ard Szerz\H o and not Sz. Szerz\H o)
  • Preferably put curly braces around the LaTeX accents, especially for the first characters of the name: e.g. Kiss, {\'A}d{\'a}m and not Kiss, \'Ad\'am. The latter can result in A. Kiss in the generated PDF (e.g. in LNCS template) instead of Á. Kiss.
  • Never write et al. here (if you would like to shorten a long author list, use and others, e.g. Andr\'as V\"or\"os and others. This will appear as "András Vörös et al." in the PDF output.)
  • If the author has more than one family names (e.g. Spanish people), use the <family names>, <first name> format, e.g. Fernández Adiego, Borja. (This is to avoid the wrong typesetting, such as B.F. Adiego.)
  • If the author has a hyphen in the name, put curly braces around the hyphen, e.g. Duret{-}Lutz, Alexandre. (This is in order to avoid the wrong author name-based bibliography keys, such as [DL11] instead of [D11].)
  • If the given name of the author starts with a double letter, e.g., Csaba Kiss, it might be abbreviated to C. Kiss. To avoid this, use {\relax Cs}aba Kiss.
• title: the title of the publication (mandatory)
  • Many bibliography styles will make all letters lowercase. If you have to avoid this, put curly braces around the letter or word that should not be decapitalized, e.g. The wonderful {NuSMV} model checker or The wonderful {P}etri nets
  • This behaviour (i.e. making all capital letters lowercase) is not bad, so please do not hack Bibtex, e.g. this is wrong (as it will result in an inconsistent bibliography): {T}he {W}onderful {NuSMV} {M}odel {C}hecker
  • Never put the whole title in double curly brackets! This is wrong: title = {{The wonderful NuSMV model checker}}
• booktitle: the title of the book in which the publication was released (mandatory for @inproceedings and @incollection)
  • For conference papers this is often Proceedings of the ...
  • For conferences with LNCS proceedings, this is typically not starting with Proceedings of
    • The booktitle for latest CAV proceedings is Computer Aided Verification, for the latest TACAS proceedings it is Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems and not Proc. of TACAS
  • Be careful with the booktitle field of IEEExplore BibTeX entries. Don't forget to reorder it and to remove the year from the book title. E.g. Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC), 2011 10th International Symposium on --> 10th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing or Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing. Be consistent!
  • If you are writing a paper in LNCS format, the titles of the cited books should be abbreviated according to the Springer author's guidelines (Sect. 2.8). See this for the list of abbreviations. E.g. for the TACAS proceedings write booktitle={TACAS 2015} . Do not abbreviate the non-Springer proceedings!
  • Do not fill this field for @book or @article
  • It is enough to put the real title, without the subtitle, e.g. Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems and not Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems 21st International Conference, TACAS 2015, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2015, London, UK, April 11-18, 2015, Proceedings
• volume: the volume number of the book
  • Mandatory for LNCS!
  • If you have a volume, typically you need a series too
• journal: the name of the journal
  • Use this field for @article
  • Use correct order, e.g. instead of Computers, IEEE Transactions on use IEEE Transactions on Computers
  • Either abbreviate all journals using the widely-used abbreviations, or do not abbreviate any of them
• number: the number of the issue
  • Use this field for @article
  • Never use this field for LNCS volume number.
• series: the series in which the book was published
  • Mandatory for LNCS (and similars)!
  • Do not put conference names here! TACAS'99 is not a series.
  • If you refer to an LNCS volume from a paper written in LNCS format, use the LNCS abbreviation here, do not write Lecture Notes on Computer Science according to the Springer author's guidelines (Sect. 2.8).
• editor: the editors of the book
  • Be consistent: either include for all entries or do not include for any of them
  • Do not fill for @article
• pages: the page range (mandatory, except for @book, @techreport and similars)
  • e.g. 123-147 (check twice if you see 1-13 or 1-1 here! One page long papers and papers starting on the very first page of a book are really rare.)
  • In some cases (e.g. for IEEExplore conference proceedings) there are no page numbers. In these cases omit this field instead of writing e.g. 1-13.
  • You should use a single hyphen 4-10 and not a double 4--10. The biblatex driver will parse and replace it. This way it can also correctly sort two papers from the same volume.
• year: the year when the publication was published (mandatory)
• publisher: the publisher of the publication (mandatory, except for @article)
  • If it is Springer, be consistent on it (do not mix Springer, Springer-Verlag, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, ...)
  • For PhD theses, do not use this, use the school field instead.
• school (for PhD theses): school where the thesis was written.
• address: address of the publisher
  • Typically I omit it, except in case of @book (and sometimes for conference papers without proper proceedings)
• doi: the DOI of the publication
  • Even if it is typically not displayed, it helps to check the paper later if included. Please, include it!
  • It should be always in the following format: 10.1234/xxxxxx and never http://dx.doi.org/10.1234/xxxxxx.
  • Pro tip: on the page http://doi.eptcs.org/ under the link "Where can I find..." you can upload a BibTex file (with multiple entries) and it will search for the missing DOIs.
• url: the URL of the publication
  • Only include if it is necessary to find the paper. Don't put it for a Springer or IEEE publication for example, but it's useful for a Minisymposium paper.

General advice

• Be consistent on the usage of abbreviations, e.g. Proc. of ... or Proceedings of ..., LNCS or Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ...
• Check twice if a conference proceedings is actually published in LNCS! Some providers (e.g. ACM) sometimes refer to these books as proceedings, with wrong titles.
• Delete unnecessary noise from the .bib file, such as language, abstract, keywords, acmid, ... fields. We don't need them!
• If you don't want to delete a field, but you don't want to show it either, you can put x characters before it (typically 2 or 3 xs are used).
  • E.g. author = {John First and Ken Second} --> xxxauthor = {John First and Ken Second}
  • This is useful e.g. if you modify the author list from the full list to John First and others: if ever you want to undo it, it's easier when the original author field is kept.
• If you would like to cite a paper, it is often worth to start from a BibTeX file from the publisher's page or e.g. CiteSeerX. But beware, most of the times the generated entries are not conforming the guidelines above.
• You can find non-ASCII characters in your BibTeX file with the regular expression [^\x00-\x7F]+. These should be replaced, e.g., á should be \'a or {\'a}