I'm using the MLA authoring style. I would like to print out a bibliography subdivided into different sections. I also want annotations on each source. Is this possible with BibLaTeX? Should I just do it manually?
Yes, I think you can do that with Biblatex, but I think you should still just do it manually.
Note, though, that you are probably wanting to craft your notes differently for each citation from one paper to the next, which leads to the question: why use Bibtex at all? You can generate a Bibtex file the usual way, until all the references are there, then cut&paste the .bbl file into place in your Latex file, and annotate and reformat away to your heart's content.
So I think that Bibtex makes sense as a standard repository of the basic facts about citations you might make again and again: in particular you can get it error-free; my experience as a scientific editor is that most authors are sure that their bibliographies are error-free, most have between 10% and 60% of entries having errors in them. Latex users tend to be better that Word users in this respect, and I think that it is because of Bibtex.
Caveat: you will need to mess about with the thebibliography environment to do this. But that is another question... Also, if there are errors in your Bibtex file, you will need to correct them in two places.
Why I don't like Biblatex: the Bibtex prepresentation is a standard, and is accepted by all kinds of other document processors. You shouldn't put special Latex formatting into your bibliographic database: that will reduce the utility of that database. For m in particular, I use both Latex and Context: both use Bibtex, but only Latex uses Biblatex.
I managed to write a quite nice MLA-style bibliography with bibtex and the style provided by the Reed College (which is based on Natbib), and BibUnits to subdivide the entries in sections (as discussed here)
(let me know if you have any tips with MLA styles, my paper is not finished yet)
EDIT: my answer was for standard bibtex, not biblatex, sorry
yes, you can do it easily with biblatexwith the headings:
For instance:
\defbibheading{general}{\section*{General Architecture}}
\defbibheading{european}{\section*{European Architecture}}
\printbibliography[heading=general,keyword=general]
\printbibliography[heading=european,keyword=european]
and add the relevant keywords={architecture} keywords={general} in your *.bib files
Here is a biblatex MLA-style, if you need biblatex-mla (and a related question, you may also face this problem)
Related
I'm writing a thesis where I'm asked to split the bibliography into different sections, and so far I've been using Multibib which was really perfect for what I wanted to do:
\newcites{ltex}{\TeX\ and \LaTeX\ References}
...
\bibliographystyleltex{alpha}
\bibliographyltex{lit}
But I'm now facing a limitation regarding the number of files I'm allowed to use, as described in the Multibib documentation:
The tiny \newcites command is not limited to one bibliography. In fact, you
can generate as much bibliographies as you like (only limited by the maximum
number of TEX’s output files, usually 16).
Is there any way to easily bypass this limitation? (I can't reduce the number of sections, and I would like to keep Bibtex --- AFAIU splitbib doesn't)
Many thanks,
I'd look at biblatex, which does a single read of all of the data (at the start of your file). (BTW, you might get more answers at the new TeX-specific site http://tex.stackexchange.com)
Bibtopic seems to match what I was looking for, it's even simpler than Multibib!
\usepackage{bibtopics}
...
\begin{btSect}{BIB_FILENAME}
\section{SECTION TITLE}
\btPrintAll || \btPrintCited || \btPrintNotCited
\end{btSect}
I'll accept the answer if it works properly within my document.
EDIT: Bibtopic suffers from the same problem as Multibib ... any other solution than copying the .bbl files directly into my latex files?
I'm currently using the apalike style for my bibliography, using natbib for author-year, however when I generate the bibliography I lose the labels that normally precede the reference,
i.e. [S. Rostami, 2010] Shahin Rostami (2010) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask etc etc..
I read apalike.bst and it seems this is intended, my quesiton is, how do I get them back? Something I can include in the preamble? Otherwise is there a similar style that shows labels?
Also, I'm doing this all in Lyx.
OK, a real answer!
Advice: don't use homebrew citation styles in scientific articles. If your university recommends a specific style (e.g., APA, Chicago), use the existing matching style. Otherwise, you can get a feel for what is the dominant citation/reflist style by looking at what styles used by the articles you cite.
If you really do want to create such a homebrew cite/reflist style, then the easy option is to copy the .bbl file into your article and edit that: with luck, you can devise a regex that will create all or most of the labels you want. But rerunning Bibtex will not respect the changes you have made. The "right" thing is to clone apalike.bst and change the way it generates the author/date sentence to include the label information as well. BST hacking is a bit of a black art —time-consuming, fiddly, and poorly documented— but the language is not essentially difficult. Look at btxhak, Designing Bibtex styles and Nicolas Markey's tutorial to get started. Alternatively, there are some bst-hackery-avoiding suggestions in this SO Q&A.
I'm using LaTeX and BibTeX for an article, and I want to able to cite the title of an article I reference. What is the command to do this?
I'm using \bibliographystyle{chicago} and it does not appear to be \citeT{}, \citetitle{} or \citeTitle{}
#Norman, and the various commenters, are correct in that it would be difficult to do this with bibtex and other tools. But, there is an alternative. Biblatex does allow this through the command \citetitle. Also, if you really want to, the formatting drivers in biblatex are easily readable and modifiable, but only if you feel the need. Unfortunately, it is not part of any distribution, yet, so it has to be downloaded and installed.
Just type in the title. Even natbib, the most powerful widespread BibTeX package, is not powerful enough to do what you want out of the box. Trying to get BibTeX to extract the title for you, by means of a LateX command, is possible, but it would require that you
Design a new format for bibliography items that is incompatible with existing formats.
Write your own custom .bst file, using the very strange postfix language that is used only by BibTeX, to be compatible with your new format.
Write a new LaTeX command to pull the title information out of the new format.
Speaking as someone who has written several custom bst files as well as a replacement for BibTeX, it's just not worth fooling with. After all, if you are citing the paper, you probably know the title anyway.
EDIT: If you have to do this with multiple papers, I would try to cheat. Extend the bst file so that it writes into the bbl file a command that writes into the aux file the title associated with each bibkey. You can model the bbl command on \label and the actual title-citing command on \ref.
This is how I solve the title issue for cited papers:
In the preamble
include Natbib:
\usepackage[sort&compress]{natbib}
If you want to cite a TITLE instead of an author in the text you define the title like this in the preamble:
\defcitealias{Weiser1996designingcalm}{Designing Calm Technology}
Note:
You need to have a bibtex item (for the title ''Designing Calm Technology'') with the key {Weiser1996designingcalm}.
In the paper where you want to write the cited paper's title
\citetalias{Weiser1996designingcalm}
this results in => Designing Calm Technology (i.e. the text you specified with the \defcitealias command above)
or
\citepalias{Weiser1996designingcalm}
that results in => (Designing Calm Technology) (i.e. title with parenthesis)
This question is old and maybe \citefield was not around back in the days, but now it works like charm for this kind of problems:
\documentclass[varwidth]{standalone}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
#article{example,
title = {NAME OF PAPER},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\citefield{example}{title}
\end{document}
Got it from this question.
Thanks to Anders for the hint. \defcitealias seems to be the way to go.
Bibtex produces a .bbl file which contains the bibliography entries. something like that
\bibitem[\protect\citeauthoryear{Andrienko
{\itshape{et~al.}}}{2003}]{Andrienko2003}
Andrienko, G., Andrienko, N., and Voss, H., 2003. {GIS for Everyone: The
CommonGIS Project and Beyond}. {\itshape {In}}: {\itshape {Maps and the
Internet}}., 131--146 Elsevier.
I use Eclipse, which is free and that you may already have to apply regular expressions in this file when needed. '\R' acts as platform independent line delimiter. Here is an example of multi-line search:
search:
\\bibitem.*(\R.*)?\R?\{([^{]*)\}\R^[^\\].*\d\d\d\d\.\s([^\.]*\R?[^\.]*)\R?.*\R?.*
and replace:
\\defcitealias{$2}{$3}
(For myself I use \\bibitem.*(\R.*)?\R?\{([^{]*)\}$\R^([^\\].*[^\}]$\R.*$\R.*) to get all the item text)
Et produces a series of \defcitealias that can be copypasted elsewhere:
\defcitealias{Andrienko2003}{{GIS for Everyone: The
CommonGIS Project and Beyond}}
Finally, this can be used to build a custom command such as:
\newcommand{\MyCite}[1]{\citet*{#1}. \citetalias{#1}.}
Used as \MyCite{Andrienko2003} and producing: Andrienko et al. (2003). GIS for Everyone: The CommonGIS Project and Beyond.
IEEE conference publications in two-column format require authors to manually equalize the lengths of the columns on the last page of the final submission. I have typically done this by inserting a \newpage where necessary -- which usually ends up being somewhere amidst my (manually entered) references.
However, I have recently begun using BibTeX to manage references, and have now run into a problem: my last page contains only a few (generated) references, and I can't figure out how to manually equalize the columns.
The last page is the tail end of what is generated by:
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{IEEEabrv,library}
Any ideas on how I can equalize the columns while continuing to use BibTeX?
I have submitted to both ACM and IEEE conferences and the easiest thing for me has been using:
\usepackage{flushend}
I've heard it doesn't always work well, but it's been great for me
http://www.ctan.org/pkg/flushend
I went back to RTFM again, and it turns out this is addressed right in "How to Use the IEEEtran LaTeX Class" by Michael Shell (maintainer). Section XIV notes that IEEEtran helpfully provides the \IEEEtriggeratref{} command for just this purpose. By default, it fires a \newline at the given BibTeX reference number. You can even change the command to fire with \IEEEtriggercmd{}.
It can also be done by using the balance package. You simply include the balance package in the preamble (\usepackage{balance}) and insert \balance some place on the last page of your document (for instance right in front of the references). However, I'm not sure if it's working if the last page (both columns) is completely full of references...
IEEE requires authors to equalize the lengths of the columns on the last page.
ACM makes us do this too. I just wind up inserting \vfill\break by hand either in the main text or somewhere in the .bbl file, wherever it makes the columns balance. By the time camera-ready copy goes to ACM, they want the .bbl file inlined by hand anyway, so tinkering by hand does not present an additional hardship.
The reference-number trick might be nice except I never use numbered references :-)
The multicols environment works only if you're luck and your last page comes out exactly as bibliography.
It would be extremely good (and not so difficult) if some enterprising hacker would build the "balance the two columns in the last page" functionality straight into LateX's \output routine. The flexibility is there in the underlying engine, and it would make a lot of people happy.
Not sure if multicol conflicts with bibtex at all, and I don't have time to check, sorry. But try this:
use the multicol package:
\usepackage{multicol} in your preamble, then:
\begin{multicols}{2}
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\bibliography{IEEEabrv,library}
\end{multicols}
Multicol automatically balances columns. I would recomend using it through out your document, instead of using the .cls or .sty's twocolumn option.
My preferred bibtex style file cites via author's initials. However, there are various texts which should be cited differently (for example, Elements Geometrie Algebrique should always be cited as [EGA]). I know how to modify this in the .bbl file that bibtex outputs, but then I have to do this for every file. Is there a way to do this from my .bib file?
My preferred bibtex style file cites via author's initials. However, there are various texts which should be cited differently...
I hope I don't get flamed for this, but your preferred bibtex style file does not serve your readers very well. Part of my job is to review papers, and a jumble of initials like [GKS] is not nearly as helpful as a full author-date citation like [Guibas, Knuth, and Sharir 1990]. For a knowledgeable reader, the authors and date often make it unneccessary to refer to the bibliography. For a naïve reader, a group of names is much easier to remember then a group of letters, especially when one or more of the names may be familiar. These issues are discussed in detail by, e.g., the Chicago Manual of Style, which explains the proper way to cite from the professional literature.
I go on at such length because I believe you are solving the wrong problem. Although I believe your readers will quickly recognize [EGA], I would hope they would also recognize (Grothendieck 1960) or (Grothendieck and Dieudonné 1967).
Can I [modify the way a work is cited] by changing my .bib file?
Not if you want to use any of the standard BibTeX styles. BibTeX uses one of the world's worst programming languages, and the standard programs are very firm about using the author or editor of a work for form the citation key. If you really want to do this, I recommend the following procedure:
Clone and modify something like the plainnat.bst file. This will enable you to create a new "bibliography style."
Create a new type of BibTeX entry which will enable you to specify the citation key using a special field (key is a popular choice).
Alter the calc.label function to do the right thing with your new type of entry. If you're lucky, changing calc.label will be enough to be sure the thing is sorted properly.
Use your nonstandard type in your .bib file and use your nonstandard \bibliographystyle{...} in all your LaTeX documents.
The gods really don't want you to do this—and neither do your coauthors...
You can modify the .bst program so that it looks for an additional field, say shown-key, and if it is set uses that rather than the usual.
If you are willing to use a different bib style there is a way pointed out by this answer. Using the abstract style, the bibtex key is used as the cite key. Then, you edit each key in the bib file anyway you want it.
A straightforward disadvantage of this approach is that you will have to edit every item in your bib file, however I believe that it is a fair price to pay for such flexibility.
I've seen other possible solutions involving natbib or biblatex, but I wanted to avoid those packages as I sometimes get compilation problems when using them.