BIBT_EXpress -- BIBT_EX Entry Builder
version 1.0

Paulo G. S. da Fonseca
Centro de Informática
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

In the form below, fill in all that apply. Notice that:

1. For both the Book and Book extract categories, you must choose to fill in either the Author or the Editor field, not both as the checkboxes might suggest. Also for those categories, you cannot fill in both the Number and the Volume fields.
2. For the Book extract category, you can either fill in both the Chapter and Pages fields or choose between one of them.
3. For the Collection book, Conference proceedings article and Proceedings categories, you cannot fill in both the Number and the Volume fields.

If you are unfamiliar with BIBT_EX and/or BIBT_EXpress, you might want to take some time to read the user's guide below.

The objective of this section is to provide ordinary users with enough information to enable them to create a bibliography database file (.bib) and then use BIBT_EX together with L^AT_EX to typeset consistent citations as well as standard bibliography sections for their documents. We shall not discuss the details concerning the format of BIBT_EX .bib files neither we cover nonstandard use of BIBT_EX. For this, the reader should better refer to [2] or [3].

In general, citations in a L^AT_EX document are entered with the command \cite{cite_key}, where cite_key is is the keyword that identifies a particular entry in the bibliography list environment thebibliography. For a small number of references, this latter list could be constructed by hand. However for a large number of references, it is probably more practical to obtain those references from a BIBT_EX (.bib) bibliography database file. A sample .bib file for the references listed in the references section of this document is shown below.

So, suppose you wanted to enter a citation for the "L^AT_EX Companion" book in your document given the file above. To do that, you should use the command \cite{goossens:1994}. The way the citation is typeset, though, is determined by the bibliography style chosen with the command \bibliographystyle{style_name}. If no style is explicitly informed, L^AT_EX assumes the default plain style. The actual list of BIBT_EX styles made avaiable varies a lot from one L^AT_EX distribution to another. In general, these styles are developed by certain individuals or organizations to meet their particular needs/standards and then made available for public access through the Internet. A more complete discussion about BIBT_EX styles can be found on [3].

To insert a bibliography section in your document, you should use the command \bibliography{bibfile} where bibfile is the name of the bibliography database file without the .bib extension. So, suppose the file depicted above is named "sample.bib", then the general form of your document would be something like

All references mentioned in the text through the \cite command will be included in the bibliography section. If you want a particular reference to be listed in the bibliography section even if it is not cited in the text body, then you should use the \nocite{cite_key}, where cite_key is the keyword that identifies the reference you want to be listed. If you want all references in the .bib to be included in the bibliography section, then you should use the shortcut \nocite{*}.

To finalize this section, we discuss the procedure for running L^AT_EX and BIBT_EX in your document. Here we assume that you want to typeset the file "sample.tex" which has the form outlined above. The following commands should be issued in order:

1. latex sample.tex - L^AT_EX generates a list of \cite references in the auxiliary file sample.aux.
2. bibtex sample.tex - BIBT_EX looks up the references listed in the sample.aux file in the sample.bib file and then writes a file named sample.bbl containing the formatted references according to the chosen style. Warning and error messages are written to the log file sample.log.
3. latex sample.tex - run L^AT_EX again, which now reads the sample.bbl reference file.
4. latex sample.tex - run L^AT_EX a third time to resolve forward references.

Building a BIBT_EX entry with BIBT_EXpress

The use of BIBT_EXpress is quite straightforward. To generate a BIBT_EX entry for a given reference, do the following:

1. Select the appropriate category (check section Available categories) for the reference from the drop down list labeled "Category".
2. Once you have selected the category, the required and optional fields for the selected category will be indicated by the correspondent checkboxes in the columns labeled "Required" and "Optional", respectively.
3. Fill in all the required fields and all the optional fields you wish.
4. Press "Build".
5. The corresponding BIBT_EX entry will be shown in the box labeled "BIBT_EX Entry". You can now copy this entry and paste it into any standard BIBT_EX (.bib) data file. Note: You do NOT have to use any TeX commands for accented characters.

Available categories

You can use one of the following categories for your reference:

• Article - an article from a journal or magazine.
• Book - a book with an explicit publisher.
• Booklet - a work which is printed and bound, but without a named publisher or sponsoring institution.
• Book extract - a part of a book, e.g., a chapter, a section and/or a range of pages.
• Collection book - A part of a book having its own title.
• Conference proceeding article - an article in a conference proceedings.
• Manual - Technical documentation.
• Master's Thesis
• PhD Thesis
• Conference proceedings
• Technical report - a report published by a school or other institution, usually numbered within a series.
• Unpublished Material - a document having an author and title, but not formally published.
• Other - select this option only if none of the above apply.

Field description

• Category - the category of the reference, as described above. (back to field)
• Type - the type of a technical report, e.g., "Research Note." This name is used instead of the default "Technical Report." For the book extract category you can get, for instance, "section 1.2" instead of the default "chapter 1.2" by typing "1.2" in the chapter field and "Section" in this field. (back to field)
• Title - the title of the work typed, prefferably, exactly as it appears in the original version. The decision of whether it is going to be presented in capitalized form or not should be delegated to the BIBT_EX bibliography style used. To make sure that a certain part will remain unchanged, enclose it beetwen curly braces, e.g., "Learning {GNU} Emacs". (back to field)
• Author - In general, BIBT_EX treats names as if they were made up of four distinct parts, in order, First, von, Last, and Jr., all of which, except Last, can be empty. In most cases, typing author names exactly as they appear in the original work, e.g., "Donald E. Knuth", will produce the desired result. It is also very common to use the following forms:
  • Last, First, e.g., "Newton, Isaac"
  • von Last, First, e.g., "van Dam, Andries"
  • von Last, Jr, First, e.g., "de la Porte, Fils, {Émile}"
  As with the title, you can use curly braces to indicate the parts of the name that must remain untouched. For instance, in the last example, we have written "{Émile}" to prevent it from being shown as "É." (which is weird because of the acute accent). We can also use curly braces to indicate explicitly that a two or more words should be treated as "one" part. For instance, you should write "Cavalcanti, {João Paulo}" to tell BIBT_EX that "João Paulo" should be treated as the first name. (back to field)
• Month - the month in which the work was published or, for an unpublished work, the month it was written. (back to field)
• Year - the year in which the work was published or, for an unpublished work, the year it was written. For clarity sake, use a 4 digit number in arabic numerals. (back to field)
• Chapter number - a chapter (or section or whatever) number, e.g., "1.2". (back to field)
• Pages - one or more page numbers or range of numbers, e.g., "7,9--11,30--61, 80". Notice that in (L^A)T_EX
, you use a double dash (or en-dash in the proper T_EX terminology) "--" to indicate number ranges. (back to field)
• Volume - the volume of a journal or multivolume book. (back to field)
• Number - the number of a journal, magazine, technical report, or work in a series. (back to field)
• Edition - the edition of a book, e.g., "Second". This should be an ordinal and should have the first letter capitalized. (back to field)
• Journal - journal name. (back to field)
• Book title - when using the book extract category, this string indicates the title of the book part of which is being cited. The same rules for the title field are applicable here. (back to field)
• Series title - the name of a series or set of books. When citing an entire book, the title field gives its title and this optional field gives the name of a series or multivolume set in which this the book was published. (back to field)
• School - the name of the school where the thesis was written. (back to field)
• Institution - the name of the institution sponsoring a technical report. (back to field)
• Organization - the name of the organization that sponsors a conference or publishes a manual. (back to field)
• Editor - Name(s) of the editor(s) of the work. The same rules for the author field apply here. (back to field)
• Publisher - the publisher's name. (back to field)
• Address - usually the address of the publisher or other institution. For major publishing houses, only the city should suffice. For small publishers, a more complete address might be useful for the reader. (back to field)
• How published - how something unusual has been published. (back to field)
• Note - any additional information that can help the reader. (back to field)
• Annotation - This field is used by BIBT_EX bibliography styles that produce annotated references, e.g., annote. (back to field)

[1] Donald E. Knuth. The T_EXbook, volume A of Computers and Typesseting. Addison Wesley, Reading, 1986.

[2] Oren Patashnik. BIBT_EXing. Documentation for general BIBT_EX users, 8 february 1988. Electronic document coming with the BIBT_EX distribution.

[3] Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, and Alexander Samarin. The L^AT_EX Companion. Addison Wesley, Reading, 1994.

About BIBT_EXpress

BIBT_EXpress is free for non-commercial use. It is fully contained into the present static HTML page so, in order to make it available locally, all you have to do is use your browser's "Save" or "Save as" menu option to store this file in the appropriate location. Bugs should be reported to the author through the address paguso@cin.ufpe.br. Constructive criticism and suggestions are also always welcome.

Last update: 21-jul-2006