5.1.2 Writing the .bib File Manually
It may be that you don't want to or can't use a bibliography management application, such as JabRef. In which case, you can create the .bib file in an ordinary text editor, such as the one you use to write your LaTeX documents. When you save the file, make sure you give it the extension .bib. Entries in this file should have the following form[Creating a BibTeX bibliography]:
@<entry type>{<keyword>,
<field name> = "<text>",
⋮
<field name> = "<text>"
}
where <entry type> indicates the type of entry (e.g. book or article).
Standard entry types are listed in Table 5.2.
Within an entry, <keyword> is a short label that is used to cite
this work with the \cite command. If you have written
bibliographies with the thebibliography environment, it's the same as the
argument to \bibitem. There then follows a comma-separated
list of fields of the form <field name> = <value>.
The <field name> indicates what kind of field it is, e.g. title or author. Table 5.3 lists
the standard fields. Note that some bibliography styles may define
additional non-standard fields, such as email or
url.[URLS in BibTeX bibliographies]
See the BibTeX documentation [11] for information about other fields not
listed in Table 5.3.
The required and optional fields for the standard entry types are listed in Table 5.4. If an entry has a field that is neither required nor optional, BibTeX will ignore it. This means that you can have a field called, say, abstract, which will be ignored by the standard bibliography styles, but will be included if you use a bibliography style that has an abstract field. So you can store additional information in the database that won't appear in the bibliography.
The author and editor fields have the same format as described in §5.1.1. JabRef. That is, each name should be in one of the forms listed in Table 5.1, and multiple authors or editors must be separated with the keyword “and”.
Example (Multiple Authors):
This example uses the book entry:
@book{goossens97,
author = "Goossens, Michel and Rahtz, Sebastian and
Mittelbach, Frank",
title = "The \LaTeX\ graphics companion: illustrating
documents with \TeX\ and {PostScript}",
publisher = "Addison Wesley Longman, Inc",
year = 1997
}
In this example, the <keyword> is goossens97. That is
the identifying key used in \cite, described below.
The standard bibliography styles usually convert titles to lower case,
so the name PostScript is enclosed in curly braces to prevent this from
happening.
Note that curly braces {} can be used instead of double quotes.
The above example can just as easily be written:
@book{goossens97,
author = {Goossens, Michel and Rahtz, Sebastian and
Mittelbach, Frank},
title = {The \LaTeX\ graphics companion: illustrating
documents with \TeX\ and {PostScript}},
publisher = {Addison Wesley Longman, Inc},
year = 1997
}
Numbers (such as the year 1997) don't need to be delimited with quotes or braces. So you can have
but a page range would need to be delimited:
Bibliography styles always have three-letter abbreviations for months: jan, feb, mar, etc. These should be used instead of typing them in explicitly, as their format depends on the bibliography style. These abbreviations should be entered without quotes. For example:
@inproceedings{talbot97,
author = "Talbot, Nicola and Cawley, Gavin",
title = "A fast index assignment algorithm for
robust vector quantisation of image data",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the I.E.E.E. International
Conference on Image Processing",
address = "Santa Barbara, California, USA",
month = oct,
year = 1997
}
This book is also available as A4 PDF or 12.8cm x 9.6cm PDF or paperback (ISBN 978-1-909440-02-9).