BibTeX database files (extension .bib) are plain text files. They consist of entries of various kinds. Each entry describes a book, an article, a manual, etc. Example:
@BOOK{kn:gnus,
AUTHOR = "Donald E. Knudson",
TITLE = "1966 World Gnus Almanac",
PUBLISHER = {Permafrost Press},
ADDRESS = {Novosibirsk}
}
The @BOOK states that this is an entry of type book. Various entry types are described below. The kn:gnus is the cite key, as it appears in the argument of a \cite command referring to the entry.
This entry has four fields, named AUTHOR, TITLE, PUBLISHER, and ADDRESS. The meanings of these and other fields are described below. A field consists of the name, followed by an "=" character with optional space around it, followed by its text. The text of a field is a string of characters, with no unmatched braces, surrounded by either a pair of braces or a pair of " characters. Entry fields are separated from one another, and from the key, by commas. A comma may have optional space around it.
The outermost braces that surround the entire entry may be replaced by parentheses. An end-of-line character counts as a space and one space is equivalent to one hundred (as in LaTeX). BibTeX ignores the case of letters in the entry type, cite key, and field names.
The quotes or braces can be omitted around text consisting entirely
of numerals:
When entering a reference in the database, the first thing to decide is what type of entry it is. No fixed classification scheme can be complete, but BibTeX provides enough entry types to handle almost any reference reasonably well.
References to different types of publications contain different information; a reference to a journal article might include the volume and number of the journal, which is usually not meaningful for a book. Therefore, database entries of different types have different fields. For each entry type, the fields are divided into three classes:
The following are the standard entry types, along with their required and optional fields, that are used by the standard bibliography styles. The fields within each class (required or optional) are listed in order of occurrence in the output, except that a few entry types may perturb the order slightly, depending on what fields are missing. These entry types are similar to those adapted by Brian Reid from the classification scheme of van Leunen for use in the Scribe system. The meanings of the individual fields are explained in the next section. Some nonstandard bibliography styles may ignore some optional fields in creating the reference. Remember that, when used in the bib file, the entry-type name is preceded by an @ character.
In addition to the fields listed above, each entry type also has an
optional key field, used in some styles for
alphabetizing, for cross referencing, or for forming a
\bibitem label. You should include a
key field for any entry whose "author" information is missing; the
"author" information is usually the
author field, but for some entry types it can be the editor or even the
organization field. Do not confuse the key
field with the citekey that appears in the
\cite command and at the beginning of the database entry;
this field is named "key" only for compatibility with Scribe.
BibTeX recognizes two more fields not mentioned above. The annote field can be used to produce an annotated bibliography. The crossref field can be used for cross-referencing between entries; see the LaTeX manual for details.
Bibtex.php uses some extra fields. The keywords field is used to assign one or more keywords to the entry that can be used to group entries into subject areas or bibliographies. The url field is typically used to point to the actual paper on the web. Both keywords and url can have multiple values, which must be entered on separate lines in the bibtex.php interface, or comma separated in the bib file. The abstract field can be used to keep the abstract of a paper. You can include any other fields you want in an entry, bibtex.php will keep them in its database, and BibTeX will ignore them when typesetting a bibliography.
Finally, entrytype, which is used to classify entries, and citekey, which is used for referencing an entry, are not fields in the above sense, but appear as such in the bibtex.php interface.
Below is a description of all fields recognized by the standard bibliography styles. An entry can also contain other fields, which are ignored by those styles.
\cite command
and at the beginning of the database entry. The text of an author or editor field represents a name. In bibtex.php, multiple names should be entered on separate lines. They will be joined using "and" in the BibTeX output. The bibliography style determines how the names are printed: whether the first name or last name appears first, if the full first name or just the first initial is used, etc. Most names can be entered in the obvious way, i.e., "John Paul Jones" or "Jones, John Paul". However, only the second form, with a comma, should be used for people who have last names with multiple parts that are capitalized. People with a "Jr." in their name should be entered as "Ford, Jr., Henry".
If an entry has more names than you want to type, just end the list of names with "others"; the standard styles convert this to the conventional et al. For foreign names with accented characters, please refer to the Non-English characters section.
The bibliography style determines whether or not a title is capitalized; the titles of books usually are, the titles of articles usually are not. You type a title the way it should appear if it is capitalized.
title = "The Agony and the Ecstasy"
You should capitalize the first word of the title, the first word after a colon, and all other words except articles and unstressed conjunctions and prepositions. BibTeX will change uppercase letters to lowercase if appropriate. Uppercase letters that should not be changed are enclosed in braces. The following two titles are equivalent; the A of Africa will not be made lowercase.
"The Gnats and Gnus of {Africa}"
"The Gnats and Gnus of {A}frica"
Bibtex.php does not currently support non-ascii characters. To enter foreign characters you need to use LaTeX escape sequences described below. BibTeX is sometimes confused by these sequences, but it will do the right thing if you put curly braces immediately around the sequence, e.g. {\"{o}} or {\"o} will work.
The following accents may be placed on letters. Although "o" is used in most of the examples, the accents may be placed on any letter. Accents may even be placed above a "missing" letter; for example, \~{} produces a tilde over a blank space.
| \`{o}: ò | \^{o}: ô | \"{o}: ö | \={o}: ō | \.{c}: ċ | \i: ı | \~{o}: õ | \u{o}: ŏ |
| \'{o}: ó | \v{s}: š | \H{o}: ő | \b{o}: o | \d{s}: ṣ | \.{I}: İ | \c{c}: ç | \t{oo}: o͡o |
Note that the letters "i" and "j" require special treatment when they are given accents because it is often desirable to replace the dot with the accent. For this purpose, the commands \i and \j can be used to produce dotless letters. For example, \^{\i} should be used for i circumflex: î, and \"{\i} should be used for i umlaut: ï.
Other characters and symbols:
| \ae: æ | \oe: œ | \aa: å | \o: ø | \l: ł | ?` or >: ¿ | \dag: † | \S: § | \copyright: © | \ss: ß |
| \AE: Æ | \OE: Œ | \AA: Å | \O: Ø | \L: Ł | !` or <: ¡ | \ddag: ‡ | \P: ¶ | \pounds: £ |
In addition, the following seven symbols need to be escaped with a backslash: \#, \$, \%, \&, \_, \{, \}.
Sheldon Green 1995: Hypertext Help with LaTeX. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/latex.
Dana Jacobsen 1996: BibTeX. http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/bib/formats/bibtex.html.
Leslie Lamport 1994: LaTeX: A Document Preparation System. User's Guide and Reference Manual. Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, November 1994. Appendix B.
Oren Patashnik 1988: BibTeXing. The documentation for BibTeX version 0.99b. http://www.denizyuret.com/ref/patashnik/btxdoc.html.
Oren Patashnik 1988: Designing BibTeX Styles. Documentatio for bibliography style writers. http://www.denizyuret.com/ref/patashnik/btxhak.html.
Urs-Jakob Rüetschi 2003: The BibTeX Bibliography Database. http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~uruetsch/varia/bibtex.html.
CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, URL http://www.ctan.org/.
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