Guidelines for Citing Referenced Material

Diomidis Spinellis
Department of Management Science and Technology
Athens University of Economics and Business
Athens, Greece
dds@aueb.gr

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:

Oxford English Dictionary Computer File: On Compact Disc. 2nd ed. CD-ROM. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
Pritzker, Thomas J. An Early Fragment from Central Nepal. March 17, 1995. Asian Arts.com. URL http://asianart.com/pritzker/pritzker.html. Accessed: 2011-11-22. (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/63NhkqLsO (http://www.webcitation.org/63NhkqLsO).)
Diomidis Spinellis. Greek character encoding for electronic mail messages. Network Information Center, Request for Comments 1947, May 1996. RFC-1947. Online. Network Information Center. Available http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1947.txt (http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1947.txt). 23 March 1998.

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.

Contents