Cite software/libraries using bibtex

Question

I would like to cite some sofware libraries I am using in a program using bibtex, but I can't quite figure out how to make that work properly. An entry might look like this:

@misc{CGAL,
  key   = "CGAL",
  title = "\textsc{Cgal}, {C}omputational {G}eometry {A}lgorithms {L}ibrary",
  note  = "http://www.cgal.org"
}

The problem is that @misc is not working optimally for me: Specifically the key (using \bibliographystyle{alpha}) is "CGA" instead of "CGAL", and I don't know how to fix that. Can I define my own style for citing software or can I at least change the key that is used for referencing?

Answer 1

You may want to load the natbib citation management package and use that package's \defcitealias macro to define, you guessed it, a "citation alias" of the form "CGAL". Then, use \citetalias{CGAL} instead of \cite{CGAL} to generate a citation call-out that uses the alias.

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@misc{CGAL,
  key   = "CGAL",
  title = {{CGAL, Computational Geometry Algorithms Library}},
  note  = "\url{http://www.cgal.org}",
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{natbib}
\defcitealias{CGAL}{CGAL}
\bibliographystyle{alpha}

\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{url,hyperref}
\hypersetup{colorlinks,citecolor=blue,urlcolor=red} % just for this example

\begin{document}
\noindent
\cite{CGAL} or \citetalias{CGAL} or [\citetalias{CGAL}]

\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}