Information and documentation on BibTeX, LaTeX, and TeX

Appendix A)  

A.1) Syntax of a BibTeX entry

BibTeX entries begin with an initial @ as the first non-blank
character on the line, followed immediately by a document type, such
as Article, Book, PhDThesis, etc., followed by a braced list of items.
The first item is the citation tag, which is the `handle' used to
refer to the entry for citation purposes.  Remaining items are
        keyname = "value",
assignments.  Keynames identify parts of the citation, such as author,
title, and year.

Particular bibliography styles generally recognize only a subset of
keynames for each document type; all others are simply ignored,
i.e. they do not appear in typeset bibliography data.  However, it is
desirable to augment entries with useful information like abstracts
and keywords that can be used in bibliographic searches.
See Appendix C for more details.


A.2) Documentation on BibTeX

We refer to the references in A.3) in BibTeX for more information
on TeX, LaTeX, and BibTeX.  A user's guide for BibTeX is in Appendix B
of Lamport's books.


A.3) Example of a BibTeX database

This is an example of what a typical BibTeX database looks like:
it lists a set of the references for BibTeX and (La)TeX typesetting.

@String{j-CACM          = "Communications of the Association for Computing
                           Machinery"}
@String{pub-AW          = "Ad{\-d}i{\-s}on-Wes{\-l}ey"}
@String{pub-AW:adr      = "Reading, MA, USA"}
@String{TUGboat         = "TUGBoat"}

@Article{Baeza-Yates:j-CACM-35-10-74,
  author =       "Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Gaston H. Gonnet",
  title =        "A New Approach to Text Searching",
  journal =      j-CACM,
  year =         "1992",
  volume =       "35",
  number =       "10",
  pages =        "74--82",
  month =        oct,
  bibdate =      "Sat Nov 7 11:35:45 1992",
}

@Article{Beebe:TB14-4-395-419,
  author =       "Nelson H. F. Beebe",
  title =        "Bibliography Prettyprinting and Syntax Checking",
  journal =      TUGboat,
  year =         "1993",
  volume =       "14",
  number =       "4",
  pages =        "395--419",
  note =         dec,
  bibdate =      "Fri Dec 31 12:15:07 1993",
}

@Article{Higham:SIAM-NEWS-27-1-10,
  author =       "Nicholas J. Higham",
  title =        "{BibTeX}: {A} Versatile Tool for {\LaTeX} Users",
  journal =      "SIAM News",
  year =         "1994",
  volume =       "27",
  number =       "1",
  pages =        "10, 11, 19",
  month =        "January"
}

@Book{Knuth:ct-a,
  author =       "Donald E. Knuth",
  title =        "The {\TeX}book",
  publisher =    pub-AW,
  address =      pub-AW:adr,
  year =         "1986",
  volume =       "{\noopsort{1986a}}A",
  series =       "Computers and Typesetting",
  ISBN =         "0-201-13447-0",
  LCCN =         "Z253.4.T47 K58 1986",
  pages =        "ix + 483",
  bibdate =      "Wed Dec 15 10:36:52 1993",
}

@Book{Lamport:LDP85,
  author =       "Leslie Lamport",
  title =        "{\LaTeX}\emdash A Document Preparation System\emdash
                 User's Guide and Reference Manual",
  publisher =    pub-AW,
  address =      pub-AW:adr,
  year =         "1985",
  ISBN =         "0-201-15790-X",
  LCCN =         "Z253.4.L38 L35 1986",
  pages =        "xiv + 242",
  bibdate =      "Wed Dec 15 10:38:04 1993",
}

@Book{Lamport:LDP94,
  author =       "Leslie Lamport",
  title =        "{\LaTeX}: {A} Document Preparation System: User's
                 Guide and Reference Manual",
  publisher =    pub-AW,
  year =         "1994",
  ISBN =         "0-201-52983-1",
  LCCN =         "Z253.4.L38L35 1994",
  address =      pub-AW:adr,
  edition =      "Second",
  pages =        "xvi + 272",
  acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
  bibdate =      "Wed Aug 10 09:55:59 1994",
}

@Article{Wonneberger:TB12-1-111-124,
  author =       "Reinhard Wonneberger and Frank Mittelbach",
  title =        "{{\BibTeX{} reconsidered}}",
  journal =      TUGboat,
  year =         "1991",
  volume =       "12",
  number =       "1",
  pages =        "111--124",
  month =        Mar,
}

@Article{Wu:j-CACM-35-10-83,
  author =       "Sun Wu and Udi Manber",
  title =        "Fast Text Searching Allowing Errors",
  journal =      j-CACM,
  year =         "1992",
  volume =       "35",
  number =       "10",
  pages =        "83--91",
  month =        oct,
  URL =          "file://cs.arizona.edu/agrep/agrep-2.04.tar.Z",
  note =         "This algorithm in this paper is implemented in the
                 \path|agrep| program, publicly available via ANONYMOUS
                 FTP to \path|cs.arizona.edu| in the \path|agrep|
                 subdirectory. See also
                 \cite{Baeza-Yates:j-CACM-35-10-74}.",
  bibdate =      "Sat Nov 7 11:31:19 1992",
}


A.4) Typesetting the example BibTeX database

This bibliography is stored in bibnet/tools/examples/bibtex-doc.bib.
The companion file bibtex-doc.ltx is a LaTeX wrapper for typesetting
bibtex-doc.bib, and the style files it requires (*.sty and *.bst), and
the UNIX Makefile, are in the same directory.

The make utility can be used like this:

        make BIB=bibtex-doc

These files can also be processed manually as follows, provided that
the cross-reference file (bibtex-doc.twx) is present:

        latex bibtex-doc.ltx
        bibtex bibtex-doc
        latex bibtex-doc.ltx
        latex bibtex-doc.ltx