Refering to website with bibtex

Question

I am using the latex package from IEEE. I want to know what is the format for referencing a web site? Which fields are required in the reference which contain URL?

Answer 1

Here is the ieeetran.bst

There are no required fields, and the accepted fields are author, month, year, title, howpublished, organization, address, note and url.

Your actual .bib entry might look something like this:

@electronic{website2013,
 author   = "Smith, John",
 title     = "Webpage Title",
 url       = "http://link.com"
}

---

Relevant information from the .bst that I referenced to find this out:

FUNCTION {electronic}
 { std.status.using.period
  start.entry
  if.url.alt.interword.spacing
  format.authors output
  name.or.dash
  format.date.electronic output
  format.article.title.electronic output
  format.howpublished "howpublished" bibinfo.check output
  format.organization "organization" bibinfo.check output
  format.address "address" bibinfo.check output
  format.note output
  format.url output
  fin.entry
  empty.entry.warn
  if.url.std.interword.spacing
}

I also had to reference the definitions for FUNCTION {format.date.electronic} and FUNCTION {format.authors} to determine that month, year, and author were the proper fields, not date and authors.

Here is some information about bibinfo.check and bibinfo.warn (also from the .bst), which is useful for interpreting some of the above code:

% bibinfo.check avoids acting on missing fields while bibinfo.warn will
% issue a warning message if a missing field is detected. Prior to calling
% the bibinfo functions, the user should push the field value and then its
% name string, in that order.