Referencing a Bachelor's Thesis

Question

LaTeX only offers @mastersthesis or @phdthesis, but no bachelor's thesis.

I tried to keep the entry as @misc, but the university name doesn't appear.

So I just used @mastersthesis and typed

type = "{B.S. Thesis}"

Is there another way of doing this -- or could I create a new @bachelorthesis entry type in the .bst file?

Answer 1

The simplest way to do so is to use @masterthesis and then setting the type to Bachelor's Thesis which will get printed instead of the default Master's Thesis. That is:

@mastersthesis{Oezoguz2012,
    ...
    type={Bachelor's Thesis}
    ...
}

---

Old Answer

The new way to reference a Bachelor's Thesis is to use @thesis, which also replaces @phdthesis and @mastersthesis (both can still be used).

@thesis{Oezoguz2012,
...
type={Bachelor's Thesis}
...

In type you can write whatever you want. But mathesis and phdthesis are predefined for Master's Thesis and PhD Thesis respectively.

Answer 2

It's not LaTeX per se but the bibliography style you use that determines, among many things, which types of bibliographic entries are recognized. If you're using a bibliography style such as plainnat, it's not much work at all to create a new entry type named, say, @bachelorsthesis. The following instructions should work not just for plainnat but for many other bibliography styles too, as long as they feature a function called mastersthesis.

• Find the file plainnat.bst in your TeX distribution. Make a copy of this file and call it, say, myplainnat.bst. (Don't edit an original file of the TeX distribution directly.)

• Open the file myplainnat.bst in your favorite text editor and locate the function called mastersthesis. (It starts on line 910 in my copy of the .bst file.)

• Copy the code of the entire function (ca. 16 lines) and paste the copy below the existing function.

  • Change the new function's name from mastersthesis to bachelorsthesis.

  • Change the string "Master's thesis" to "Bachelor's thesis".

• Save the new .bst file either in the same directory as your main .tex file or somewhere in your TeX distribution's search path. If you choose the latter method, you will probably need to update the filename database in a way that's appropriate for your TeX distribution.

• Start using the new bibliography style by invoking it via \bibliographystyle{myplainnat), rerun LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more to fully update all references and citation call-outs, and start creating and citing those entries of type @bachelorsthesis. :-)

Happy (Bib)TeXing!

Answer 3

Specifying the type of thesis within @mastersthesis

@mastersthesis{McGregor:2032,
  ...
  type = "Bachelor's thesis"

works for me when using \bibliographystyle{elsarticle-num}.