What is the recommended way to cite papers in LNCS volumes in Bib(La)TeX?

Question

What is the correct way to cite papers that appear in volumes of "Lecture Notes in Computer Science"? These papers appeared at various conferences.

• Using @inproceedings separates "LNCS" from the volume number, which is quite confusing in my opinion.
• Using @incollection produces better output, but seems misleading because these are papers from a conference, rather than some other kind of collection.

In case it is relevant, I am using the ACM BibLaTeX format.

Answer 1

In the standard styles/data model the difference between @inproceedings and @incollection isn't actually all that big.

• @inproceedings has extra fields for venue, eventdate and eventtitle to specify more conference information (if the data given in the booktitle or booktitleaddon is not sufficient). It also supports an organization field for the organising ... organisation.
• @inproceedings does not have an edition field. (Presumably because it is expected that there is never going to be a new edition of conference proceedings. Once they're published that's it.)

Semantically the only difference is that you know that an @inproceedings comes from a collection of conference papers, whereas an @incollection might be any old collection of papers. I think it doesn't hurt to make the distinction if it is easily made, but wouldn't worry about it too much if it's not easily done.

If the style you use behaves differently and gives undesirable output for both cases, check its documentation for guidance. If there is none, it might be a good idea to contact the developer about it.

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Note that "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" is a series in biblatex parlance and the number of a book in that series belongs in the number field even if Springer talks about volumes.

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Grabbing an example from the current start page of LNCS I could imagine using the following entry

\documentclass[british]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}

\usepackage[backend=biber, style=authoryear]{biblatex}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@inproceedings{clouet,
  author         = {Clouet, Myriam and Antignac, Thibaud
                    and Arnaud, Mathilde and Signoles, Julien},
  editor         = {Prevosto, Virgile and Seceleanu, Cristina},
  title          = {Context Specification Language for
                    Formally Verifying Consent Properties
                    on Models and Code},
  booktitle      = {Tests and Proofs},
  booktitleaddon = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Tests and Proofs},
  year           = {2023},
  publisher      = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
  address        = {Cham},
  pages          = {68--93},
  eventtitle     = {TAP 2023},
  venue          = {Leicester, UK},
  eventdate      = {2023-07-18/2023-07-19},
  series         = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  number         = {14066},
  doi            = {10.1007/978-3-031-38828-6_50},
}
\end{filecontents}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
Lorem \autocite{sigfridsson,clouet}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

YMMV especially with respect to the booktitle and booktitleaddon field: You may just want to have

  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Tests and Proofs},

and no booktitleaddon because the "Tests and Proofs" is part of the conference name.

You may or may not be interested in all the eventtitle, venue, eventdate stuff and may want to drop it.