Incorrect entry type
Is the entry type correct? Quite often, the entry type @article
is used for entries that are not pieces published in journals. Rule of thumb: If a given entry is lacking the field names journal
and volume
, it almost certainly shouldn't be an @article
. Especially if you use biblatex
you might want to watch out for differences between @book
and @collection
as well as @inbook
and @incollection
.
Examples
Papers only published on arXiv
inspirehep exports the following entry as @article
:
@article{Wegman:2017zui,
author = "Wegman, D.",
title = "{Deviations of exact neutrino textures using radiative
neutrino masses}",
year = "2017",
eprint = "1711.08004",
archivePrefix = "arXiv",
primaryClass = "hep-ph",
SLACcitation = "%%CITATION = ARXIV:1711.08004;%%"
}
while it seems that at the time I retrieved this entry (13 February 2018) the article was not (yet) published in a journal, thus @online
would be more appropriate. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/415117/36296 for a more detailed explanation.
PhD theses
The PhD thesis available at http://elib.suub.uni-bremen.de/diss/docs/00010668.pdf is exported by Google Scholar as
@article{lorenz2007repeated,
title={Repeated averaging and bounded confidence-modeling,
analysis and simulation of continuous opinion dynamics},
author={Lorenz, Von Jan},
year={2007},
publisher={Citeseer}
}
and by CiteSeerX as
@TECHREPORT{Lorenz07repeatedaveraging,
author = {Von Jan Lorenz},
title = {Repeated Averaging and Bounded Confidence -
Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Continuous Opinion Dynamics},
institution = {},
year = {2007}
}
Note the incorrect name fields author = {Von Jan Lorenz},
and author={Lorenz, Von Jan},
. The author is called Jan Lorenz, presumably the "von" was added because the title page has "Repeated Averaging and Bounded Confidence: Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Continuous Opinion Dynamics von Jan Lorenz", here "von" is the German for "by".
Furthermore, Google Scholar collapses CiteSeerX's separator between title and subtitle (␣-␣
, where ␣
is a space), into -
making it appear that the thesis is about bounded confidence-modeling
.
Lastly, it is a bit of a stretch to list CiteSeer as the publisher
here. Traditionally @article
entries don't show a publisher anyway, so there is little point in including it, but CiteSeer did most certainly not publish the original thesis.
For most BibTeX styles the correct entry would probably be
@phdthesis{lorenz,
author = {Jan Lorenz},
title = {Repeated Averaging and Bounded Confidence:
Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Continuous Opinion Dynamics},
school = {Universität Bremen},
year = {2007},
}
and for biblatex
it would be
@phdthesis{lorenz,
author = {Jan Lorenz},
title = {Repeated Averaging and Bounded Confidence},
subtitle = {Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Continuous Opinion Dynamics},
institution = {Universität Bremen},
date = {2007-02},
url = {http://elib.suub.uni-bremen.de/diss/docs/00010668.pdf},
}
This example can be found in Incomplete references in Revtex.