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, 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. 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 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.