formatted bibliography: want URL to be placed before, not after, year

Question

I'm a newbie to bibliography styles in Latex, I'm trying to print out a bibliography, which should look this

title, url, year

Right now, though, it looks like

title, year, url

My bib file looks like this:

@article{gleichtaktdrossel,
  title={{Funktionsweise einer Gleichtaktdrossel}},
  note = {URL: \url{http://www.richtek.com/~/media/Richtek/Design%20Support/Technical%20Documentation/AN008/EN/Version6/image002.gif?file=preview.png}},
  year={2008},
}

If I don't mention a url in the bib file the year is printed out at the end of the sentence.

Answer 1

I think you're making two mistakes. Nothing calamitous, for sure, just ordinary rookie mistakes which can happen while generating formatted bibliographies.

• You should not be using the entry type @article for the entry at hand. The @article type is meant for pieces that were published in journals. You have probably been getting warning messages from BibTeX -- which you may or may not have been ignoring, that some entries were missing required fields. For the @article type, fields named author and journal are required. You should probably be using the @misc entry type instead for the entry at hand.

• Once you've switched to the @misc entry type, you should also change the name of the field that contains the URL from note to howpublished: In most bibliography styles I'm familiar with, the material in the year field is placed after the material contained in the howpublished field. (As you've discovered, material in a field named note tends to be placed at the very end.)

The following example uses the plainnat bibliography style and the natbib citation management package. The ordering of the fields -- title before howpublished before year -- is the same in many other bibliography styles.

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mybib.bib}
@misc{gleichtaktdrossel,
  title={{Funktionsweise einer Gleichtaktdrossel}},
  howpublished = {URL: \url{http://www.richtek.com/%7E/media/Richtek/Design%20Support/Technical%20Documentation/AN008/EN/Version6/image002.gif?file=preview.png}},
  year={2008},
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage[numbers,square]{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}

\begin{document}
\cite{gleichtaktdrossel}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}