Introduction
The correct citation of referenced material is an important aspect of
scientific publications.
The following guidelines provide a quick starting point for creating and
managing citations.
The guidelines are structured as follows:
first we outline the type of information that can appear in cited items
(
citation elements),
then, for every type of item (article, book, thesis) we indicate information
that is required or optional (
citation contents), and finally
we outline citation formats, give some examples, and describe the tools we use.
This guide is intended to be an efficient reference for creating
scientific citations.
It is biased towards the citation formats supported by BibTeX.
It is not intended to be complete or authoritative.
Citation Elements
The following list includes all elements that can appear in citations.
Author and editor lists are separeted by "and" in BibTeX files;
in citations they are typically separated by a comma, with an "and"
appearing before the last one.
Address | Publisher's address. For major ones just the city |
Annote | Annotation |
Author | First Last or Last, First. Multiple are separated by and |
Booktitle | Title properly capitalised |
Chapter | A chapter number |
Edition | Edition of the book, e.g. second |
Editor | First Last or Last, First. Multiple are separated by and |
HowPublished | If it was published in a strange way |
Institution | Institution that published it |
Journal | Journal name. Abreviations may exist ($TEXINPUTS/*.bst) |
Key | Used for alphabetizing and creating a label when no author |
Month | Month of publication, usual abbreviations |
Note | Additional information to help the reader |
Number | Number of a journal magazine to TR. |
Organization | Organization sponsoring the conference. |
Pages | Page numbers or range. |
Publisher | Publisher's name. |
School | Name of the school where the thesis was written. |
Series | The name of a series or set of books. |
Title | The work's title. |
Type | Type of a technical report e.g. Research Note |
Volume | The volume of a journal or multivolume book. |
Year | The year of publication. Numerals only." |
Citation Contents
The following sections indicate required and optional items for different
types of cited material.
In general, avoid providing a URL for archived material
(articles and conference papers stored in digital libraries),
especially when a DOI is available.
Article
Title | Required |
Author | Required |
Journal | Required |
Volume | Optional |
Number | Optional |
Pages | Optional |
Month | Optional |
Year | Required |
URL | Optional |
Note | Optional |
DOI | Optional |
Book
Title | Required |
Edition | Optional |
Series | Optional |
Volume | Optional |
Author | Required or include Editor |
Editor | Required or include Author |
Publisher | Required |
Address | Optional |
Month | Optional |
Year | Required |
Note | Optional |
ISBN | Optional |
Booklet
Address | Optional |
Author | Optional |
HowPublished | Optional |
Key | Optional (needed if no Author) |
Month | Optional |
Note | Optional |
Title | Required |
Year | Optional |
InBook
Address | Optional |
Author | Required or include Editor |
Chapter | Required or include Pages |
Edition | Optional |
Editor | Required or include Author |
Month | Optional |
Note | Optional |
Pages | Required or include Chapter |
Publisher | Required |
Series | Optional |
Title | Required |
Volume | Optional |
Year | Required |
InCollection
Author | Required |
Title | Required |
Chapter | Optional |
Pages | Required |
Editor | Optional |
Booktitle | Required |
Publisher | Required |
Address | Optional |
Month | Optional |
Year | Required |
Note | Optional |
DOI | Optional |
InProceedings
Title | Required |
Author | Required |
Booktitle | Required |
Address | Optional |
Month | Optional |
Year | Required |
Organization | Optional |
Pages | Optional |
Editor | Optional |
Publisher | Optional |
Note | Optional |
URL | Optional |
DOI | Optional |
Manual
Address | Optional |
Annote | Annotation |
Author | Optional |
Edition | Optional |
Key | Optional (needed if no Author) |
Month | Optional |
Note | Optional |
Organization | Optional |
Title | Required |
Year | Optional |
MastersThesis
Address | Optional |
Author | Required |
Month | Optional |
Note | Optional |
School | Required |
Title | Required |
Year | Required |
Misc
Author | Optional |
HowPublished | Optional |
Key | Optional (needed if no Author) |
Month | Optional |
Note | Optional |
Title | Optional |
Year | Optional |
DOI | Optional |
PhDThesis
Address | Optional |
Author | Required |
Month | Optional |
Note | Optional |
School | Required |
Title | Required |
Year | Required |
Proceedings
Title | Required |
Editor | Optional |
Note | Optional |
Organization | Optional |
Address | Optional |
Publisher | Optional |
Month | Optional |
Year | Required |
DOI | Optional |
TechReport
Author | Required |
Title | Required |
Note | Optional |
Type | Optional |
Number | Optional |
Month | Optional |
Year | Required |
Institution | Required |
Address | Optional |
DOI | Optional |
Unpublished
Author | Required |
Month | Optional |
Note | Required |
Title | Required |
Year | Optional |
Citations in the Text
The are a number of established forms for referencing a citation
in the publication text.
The reference should be unambiguous and the format used should be consistent.
Some popular styles include:
- [Author-Initial(s)Year]
-
as in [Spi97] (single author) or [WKS82] (multiple authors) or [Knu88b]
(multiple works for the same author and year).
- [Number]
-
as in [12]. Citations are then numbered by order of occurence in the
document or by the order they appear when sorted by the author names.
- Supersctipt number
- as in12
numbered as described in the previous case.
- Author (year)
- as in Spinellis (1997) or Kernighan and Ritchie (1978),
or (Knuth 1981).
Append a lowercase letter (a, b, c) for multiple works by the same author
in the same year.
The format Author (year) is used in narrative form as used by
Knuth (1983), while the format (Author year) is used when
the reference is outside the flow of the text (Knuth 1983).
We recomment against using this reference style as it confuses bilbiographic
tools without offering any significant benefits.
Choose the format appropriate for the publication you are writing for
and use it consistently.
We prefer the first format, as it is helps us identify the reference in
the text, and is efficiently supported by BibTeX.
Citation Formats
- AuthorName(s).
Book, volume VolumeNumber of Series.
Publisher, Address, editionnumber edition, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Book Title, volume VolumeNumber of Series, chapter
Chapter appearing in a book, page Pages.
Publisher, Address, editionnumber edition, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Booklet.
HowPublished, Address, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Collection title.
In EditorName, editor, Booktitle, chapter Chapter appearing in a
collection, page Pages. Publisher, Address, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Journal article.
Journal, VolumeNumber(Number):Pages, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Manual.
Organization, Address, editionnumber edition, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Mastersthesistitle.
Master's thesis, School, Address, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Miscellaneous item.
HowPublished, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Paper appearing in proceedings.
In EditorName, editor, Proceedings Title, page Pages, Address,
Month Year. Organization, Publisher.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
PhDThesisTitle.
PhD thesis, School, Address, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Technical report.
Type Number, Institution, Address, Month Year.
Note.
- AuthorName(s).
Unpublished work.
Note, Month Year.
- EditorName, editor.
ConferenceProceedingsTitle, Address, Month Year. Organization,
Publisher.
Note.
Citations to Electronic Data
Citations to data that is available in electronic format
should follow the guidelines for traditional formats,
appending at the end the following:
- medium (e.g. Online (for Internet data), CD-ROM),
- data supplier (e.g. IBM, MIT),
- for Internet data the URL, for other data the filename,
- the date you accessed the data.
It is generally preferable to cite traditional sources over Internet
pages as the latter tend to be rather volatile.
When you
do cite material on the web, archive it using
WebCite (
http://www.webcitation.org/63NhkqLsO).
Examples:
Advice for Writing BibTeX Entries
Many electronic libraries provide the ability to export a reference
in BibTeX format.
However, these references often contain errors and style bugs.
Before incorporating a reference into your database ensure that the following
hold.
- The work's title is set in title case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publication_titles), e.g.
The Vitamins Are in My Fresh California Raisins.
According to the actual style used, the words set with their first letter
in uppercase will remain so, or will be converted to lowercase.
- Set the capital letters of proper nouns and acronyms on curly braces,
so that they will remain in uppercase, even if the bibliography
style is to convert them to lowercase. Example:
Cognitive support, {UML} adherence, and {XMI} interchange in {A}rgo/{UML}.
- Ensure that the author names are given either in the form
FirstName LastName or LastName, FirstName.
- Author names should be separated with and.
- If the entry contains non-ASCII characters, use the appropriate
TeX escapes (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-a4.pdf).
Example
author = {Yann-Ga\"{e}l Gu\'{e}h\'{e}neuc and Herv\'{e} Albin-Amiot},
- Change journal names according to the macro file you are using.
For instance, write
journal = cacm,
instead of
journal = "Communications of the ACM",
This allows you to uniformly abbreviate the journal titles, according to the
publisher's style.
For this to work, you'll need a list of journal abbreviations,
like this or this (http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub//tex/bib/journal.bib) one.
- Similarly, use symbolic abbreviated month names, rather than they
full name equivalents.
For instance, write
month = dec,
instead of
month = "December",
Again, this allows the style file to abbreviate month names only if required.
- Remove unneeded curly braces or quotes from integer numbers.
For instance, write
volume = 33,
number = 6,
year = 1990,
instead of
volume = {33},
number = {6},
year = {1990},
This is only a matter of style.
- Remove the resolver URL from the Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
For instance, write
doi = {10.1145/78973.78974},
instead of
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/78973.78974},
The resolver is not part of the DOI, and should not appear in it.
Examples
- Egon Balas and Manfred W.
Padberg.
Set partitioning --- a survey.
In Nicos Christofides, editor, Combinatorial Optimization,
chapter 7, pages 151-210. Wiley, 1979.
- H. Dobbertin,
A. Bosselaers, and B. Preneel.
RIPEMD-160: A strengthened version of RIPEMD (ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/cosic/bosselae/ripemd/ripemd160.ps.gz).
In Dieter Gollmann, editor, Fast Software Encryption: Third International
Workshop, pages 71-82. Springer-Verlag, Cambridge, UK, February 1996.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1039.
- John L. Hennessy and
David A. Patterson.
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, second edition, 1996.
- Brian W. Kernighan.
Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language.
Computer Science Technical Report 100, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA,
July 1981.
Available online at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr. (Reprinted in Comparing
and Assessing Programming Languages Ed. A. Feuer N. Gehani Prentice-Hall
1984).
- David P. Maher.
Fault induction attacks, tamper resistance, and hostile reverse engineering in
perspective.
In Rafael Hirschfeld, editor, Financial Cryptography: First International
Conference, FC '97, pages 109-121, Anguilla, British West Indies,
February 1997. Springer-Verlag.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1318.
- Jef Poskanzer et al.
NETPBM: Extended portable bitmap toolkit.
Available online ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/, December 1993.
Release 7.
- W. H. Press, B. P.
Flannery, S. A. Teukolsky, and W. T. Vetterling.
Numerical
Recipes in C, pages 343-352.
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
- Jesse Reisman.
Web site design: Less
is more.
IT Professional, 1(5):63-64, September/October 1999.
- Brian Cantwell Smith.
Procedural Reflection in Programming
Languages.
PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 1982.
- Eugene H. Spafford.
The internet worm program: An analysis.
Technical Report CSD-TR-823, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2004,
November 1988.
- Diomidis Spinellis.
An implementation of the Haskell language (http://softlab.icsd.aegean.gr/~dspin/pubs/thesis/MEng/html/haskell.pdf).
Master's thesis, Imperial College, London, UK, June 1990.
- Diomidis Spinellis.
Programming Paradigms as Object Classes: A Structuring Mechanism for
Multiparadigm Programming.
PhD thesis, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, UK,
February 1994.
- Usenix Association.
Very High Level Languages Workshop (VHLL), Santa Fe, Mexico,
October 1994. Usenix Association.
- AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New
Jersey.
UNIX Time-Sharing System, Programmer's Manual, Research Version,
February 1985.
Eighth Edition.
- Niklaus Wirth.
From programming language design to computer construction.
Communications of the ACM, 28(2):159-164, February 1985.
Tools and Links
I manage bibliography lists and automatically create citations using BibTeX
a companion program for the LaTeX text-processing system.
LaTeX, BibTeX and instructions can be found on
CTAN: the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (
http://www.ctan.org/)
Extensive bibliography lists in BibTeX format are maintained on many Internet
sites such as the
Networked Computer Science Technical Reports Library (
http://www.ncstrl.org/)
When forced to use Microsoft Word I have developed
a set of BibTeX styles
that create Microsoft Word RTF files.
More information is also available from
Dana Jacobsen's
Survey of Bibliographic Tools (
http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~jacobsd/bib/tools/index.html).
Some other tools that you may wish to examine are
ProCite,
EndNote,
Reference Manager,
RefViz, and
WriteNote.
References
- John Grossman, editor.
The Chicago
Manual of Style.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, fourteenth edition,
1993.
- Donald E. Knuth.
The
TeXbook.
Addisson-Wesley, 1989.
- Leslie Lamport.
LATEX: A
Document Preparation System.
Addisson-Wesley, 1985.
- Bernice Sacks Lipkin.
Latex for
Linux: A Vade Mecum.
Springer Verlag, 1999.
- Oren Patashnik.
Designing BibTeX styles.
Available from the TeX archives, February 1988.
- Norbert Schwarz.
Introduction
to TeX.
Addison-Wesley, 1989.
- Charles H. Sides.
How to Write
and Present Technical Information.
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
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