5

In all bibliography styles I found online, volume and page numbers are printed. However, whenever I try this does not happen, I only get authors, title, journal and year for articles, and only title, publisher and year in books.

I use bibtex:

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{myreferences}

What am I doing wrong? I am probably overlooking something really basic.

EDIT: example bib-entry:

@Article{Pope00,
author = {Pope, R.J. and Millington, A.C.},
title = {Unravelling the patterns of alluvial fan development using mineral magnetic analysis: examples from the {S}parta basin, {L}akonia, southern {G}reece},
journal = {Earth surface processes and landforms},
year = {2000},
OPTvolume = {25},
OPTpages = {601-615},
}
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7
  • 2
    Can you add an example of a bib entry in myreferences.bib that doesn't print correctly? – egreg Nov 15 '12 at 17:04
  • Done it. I do not have the same information for all references, but most of them look like this. – Renée Nov 15 '12 at 18:27
  • 2
    Remove OPT; Emacs adds it so that unfilled optional fields are ignored; in order that plain.bst understands them they must be called volume and pages. – egreg Nov 15 '12 at 18:33
  • Thanks for your comment. The thing is, I've tried that. I reran my compiler a couple of times (I am using TexMakerX) but still no details... – Renée Nov 15 '12 at 18:44
  • Did you run BibTeX again? – egreg Nov 15 '12 at 18:45
7

A tradition that I believe was inaugurated by the BibTeX mode of Emacs, to which TeXStudio (formerly TeXMakerX) adheres, is that optional fields in a bibliographic entry are prefixed by OPT. So when you ask for a new @article entry, you get something like

@Article{,
  author = {},
  title = {},
  journal = {},
  year = {},
  OPTkey = {},
  OPTvolume = {},
  OPTnumber = {},
  OPTpages = {},
  OPTmonth = {},
  OPTnote = {},
  OPTannote = {}
}

(maybe with bullets to stand for the field contents). This is because some of the fields are optional and some are ignored by the standard styles, but are useful anyway. The only mandatory fields for an article are author, title, journal and year.

Since the rule of BibTeX is to ignore unknown fields, those prefixed with OPT will be ignored whether filled or empty. But if you fill them you have also to remove the OPT prefix. So, in your case, the entry should look like

@Article{Pope00,
  author = {Pope, R.J. and Millington, A.C.},
  title = {Unravelling the patterns of alluvial fan development using mineral magnetic
           analysis: examples from the {Sparta} basin, {Lakonia}, southern {Greece}},
  journal = {Earth surface processes and landforms},
  year = {2000},
  volume = {25},
  pages = {601-615},
}

Note also that, contrary to what's found in many guides, it's preferable to brace the entire word we want to maintain the capitalization of, so that kerning will be applied between all the letters.

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