How to escape the & (ampersand) character in BibTeX?

Question

I would like to put a & character in a BibTeX publisher tag. Thus far I have tried:

\& {&} {\&} "&"

with the full value enclosed in curly braces and double quotes. No matter what I do I always get a Misplaced alignment tab character &. error. Is there some special way to do this that I'm missing?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I have no problem with

publisher = {Harold \& Maude},

and running pdflatex and bibtex.

Answer 2

When you've typed correctly in the .bib file but still receive errors, go check your .bbl file.

What I usually do is

1. Delete the whole erroneous line in the .bbl file, save, then close the file.
2. Make corrections or dummy (temporary) changes in the .bib file, then compile.

---

This is an example from my .bbl file:

\bibitem{Mohanty2005}

A.~K. Mohanty, M.~Misra, and L.~T.
Drzal.

\newblock {\em {Natural Fibers,
Biopolymers, and Biocomposites}}.

\newblock Taylor {\&} `&` Francis Group,
Florida, 2005.

\newblock ISBN-10: 0-8493-1741-X.

The & is the culprit, not {\&}.

What i do is delete the whole line (newblock Taylor {\&} & Francis Group, Florida, 2005.), save, then close the .bbl file. Make corrections or dummy changes in the .bib file, then compile.

---

You can simply delete the & in the .bbl file but the next time you make a change in the field that contains that & and compile your .bib file, the error will return.

Answer 3

Typing backslash before the ampersand \& works for me.

Answer 4

This worked for me. After getting the same error message I typed a backslash in the .bib file:

publisher = {John Wiley \& Sons},

then I went to the .bbl file and modified the entry from:

\newblock John Wiley & Sons, 2nd edition.

to:

\newblock John Wiley \& Sons, 2nd edition.

and finally I recompiled, in my case: latex->bibtex->latex->latex->dvipdfm->view pdf. It worked :)