About bibtex

JabRef helps you work with your bibtex databases, but there are still rules to keep in mind when editing your entries, to ensure that your database is treated properly by the bibtex program.

Bibtex fields

There is a lot of different fields in bibtex, and some additional fields that you can set in JabRef.

Generally, you can use LaTeX commands inside of fields containing text. Bibtex will automatically format your reference lists, and those fields that are included in the lists will be (de)capitalized according to your bibliography style. To ensure that certain characters remain capitalized, enclose them in braces, like in the word {B}elgium.

Notes about some of the field types:

• Bibtexkey A unique string used to refer to the entry in LaTeX documents. Note that when referencing an entry from LaTeX, the key must match case-sensitively with the reference string.
  
  
• address
  Usually the address of the publisher or other type of institution. For major publishing houses, van Leunen recommends omitting the information entirely. For small publishers, on the other hand, you can help the reader by giving the complete address.
• annote
  An annotation. It is not used by the standard bibliography styles, but may be used by others that produce an annotated bibliography.
• author
  This field should contain the complete author list for your entry. The names are separated by the word and, even if there are more than two authors. Each name can be written in two equivalent forms:
  Donald E. Knuth or Knuth, Donald E.
  Eddie van Halen or van Halen, Eddie
  The second form should be used for authors with more than two names, to differentiate between middle names and last names.
  
  
• booktitle
  Title of a book, part of which is being cited. For book entries, use the title field instead.
• chapter
  A chapter (or section or whatever) number.
• crossref
  The database key of the entry being cross referenced.
• edition
  The edition of a book--for example, ``Second''. This should be an ordinal, and should have the first letter capitalized, as shown here; the standard styles convert to lower case when necessary.
• editor
  This field is analogue to the author field. If there is also an author field, then the editor field gives the editor of the book or collection in which the reference appears.
• howpublished
  How something strange has been published. The first word should be capitalized.
• institution
  The sponsoring institution of a technical report.
• journal
  A journal name. The name of a journal can be abbreviated using a "string". To define such string, use the string editor.
• key
  Used for alphabetizing, cross referencing, and creating a label when the ``author'' information is missing. This field should not be confused with the key that appears in the \cite command and at the beginning of the database entry.
• month
  The month in which the work was published or, for an unpublished work, in which it was written. You should use the standard three-letter abbreviation (jan, feb, mar, apr, may, jun, jul, aug, sep, oct, nov, dec).
• note
  Any additional information that can help the reader. The first word should be capitalized.
• number
  The number of a journal, magazine, technical report, or of a work in a series. An issue of a journal or magazine is usually identified by its volume and number; the organization that issues a technical report usually gives it a number; and sometimes books are given numbers in a named series.
• organization
  The organization that sponsors a conference or that publishes a manual.
• pages
  One or more page numbers or range of numbers, such as 42-111 or 7,41,73-97 or 43+ (the `+' in this last example indicates pages following that don't form a simple range). To make it easier to maintain Scribe-compatible databases, the standard styles convert a single dash (as in 7-33) to the double dash used in TeX to denote number ranges (as in 7-33).
• publisher
  The publisher's name.
• school
  The name of the school where a thesis was written.
• series
  The name of a series or set of books. When citing an entire book, the title field gives its title and an optional series field gives the name of a series or multi-volume set in which the book is published.
• title
  The work's title. The capitalization may depend on the bibliography style and on the language used. For words that have to be capitalized (such as a proper noun), enclose the word (or its first letter) in braces.
• type
  The type of a technical report--for example, ``Research Note''.
• volume
  The volume of a journal or multivolume book.
• year
  The year of publication or, for an unpublished work, the year it was written. Generally it should consist of four numerals, such as 1984, although the standard styles can handle any year whose last four nonpunctuation characters are numerals, such as `(about 1984)'. This field is required for most entry types.

Other fields

BibTeX is extremely popular, and many people have used it to store information. Here is a list of some of the more common fields:

• affiliation*
  The authors affiliation.
  
  
• abstract
  An abstract of the work.
  
  
• doi
  The Digital Object Identifier, a permanent identifier given to documents.
  
  
• eid
  The Electronic identifier is for electronic journals that also appear in print. This number replaces the page number, and is used to find the article within the printed volume. Sometimes also called citation number.
  
  
• contents*
  A Table of Contents
  
  
• copyright*
  Copyright information.
  
  
• ISBN*
  The International Standard Book Number.
  
  
• ISSN*
  The International Standard Serial Number. Used to identify a journal.
  
  
• keywords
  Key words used for searching or possibly for annotation.
  
  
• language*
  The language the document is in.
  
  
• location*
  A location associated with the entry, such as the city in which a conference took place.
  
  
• LCCN*
  The Library of Congress Call Number. I've also seen this as lib-congress.
  
  
• mrnumber*
  The Mathematical Reviews number.
  
  
• price*
  The price of the document.
  
  
• size*
  The physical dimensions of a work.
  
  
• URL
  The WWW Universal Resource Locator that points to the item being referenced. This often is used for technical reports to point to the ftp site where the postscript source of the report is located.

JuraBib

• urldate
  The date of the last page visit.