BibtexRules: Bibliography management

Describes how and where we collect the information about the scientific literature we use and cite.

File format and management tool

• We use BibTeX as our literature database format, and BibLaTeX when writing articles, whenever the publishing venue allows it.
  
  • Rationale: It is the natural choice when using LaTeX for writing, which is our most common platform.

BibTeX database conventions

Here are the rules for the actual content of a literature database: The values of the fields in the BibTeX file.

• Firstnames of authors should be fully spelled out (unless we simply do not know them)
• Citation keys are formed as follows:
  • If there is only one author (say, 'Lutz Prechelt'), use his/her complete lastname plus a two-digit year (say, 'Prechelt07')
  • Any lastname prefixes such as 'von', 'van', 'de la' etc. are ignored if they come as separate words.
  • If there is more than one author (say 'Lutz Prechelt, Stephan Salinger, Sebastian Jekutsch, and Christopher Oezbek'), use the first three letters of the lastnames of the first three authors plus a two-digit year (say 'PreSalJek07')
  • Note that only ASCII is allowed. Rewrite characters with diacritical marks (including Umlauts, just use the corresponding vowel) by ignoring the diacritical mark.
• Make sure you place title words that need to be capitalized (typically product names or other proper nouns and German nouns) in {Curly} {Brackets} (or else most BibTeX styles will remove the capitalization when producing the TeX output): "A Tale of IBM's Eclipse project" becomes "A Tale of {IBM}'s {Eclipse} Project" and will appear in TeX as "A tale of IBM's Eclipse project" rather than as "A tale of ibm's eclipse project".
• Names of Journals or Conferences should be fully spelled out. For a more concise bibliography in the articles, we use the following abbreviations which are performed automatically through BibLaTeX (see HowTo):
  • Conference → Conf.
  • International → Int'l.
  • Journal → J.
  • Proceedings of the → Proc.
  • Proceedings → Proc.
• When importing BibTeX entries from external sources, adjust them to fit with our other entries. Most important in that respect is the BibTeX key.
• Links to PDF files should all be relative to the JabRef "Main file directory" as set above (and JabRef will help determine that path by searching in the tree for you).
• When you read a paper that somebody else has entered in the BibTeX database, you should add your username at the end of the 'owner' field so that others can quickly find out who may have an opinion about the contents of the paper.
• A number of fields are used jointly: Everybody can enter their own information in that same field.
  • Review: prefix your text with a line containing only your lastname and a colon: prechelt:
  • Keywords: standardize your keywords to some degree, reuse keywords introduced by others where possible, ask them about the intended semantics if needed (or look at the other entries using that keyword).
• Everybody can introduce personal fields (prefixed with their lastname) as needed. For instance, Franz uses zieris.readstatus to remember what he has already read, skimmed, or not read. Set them up in Options→Set up general fields.

File and version management

• We use two types of .bib files: (1) Files that will be used for one single document only and kept with that document and (2) one single file that will be used many times over many years.
• That latter file is called agse.bib and is kept in a Git repository. The bib repository may be included as a Git submodule in your article repository (see HowTo).
• Let the environment variable BIBINPUTS point to your working copy of that repository.

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