BibTeX.md

BibTeX conventions

Bib entries

• Keep all bib entries in a separate .bib file.
• Keep the .bib file tidy:
  • It should contain only papers that are actually referenced in the current paper (not all your personal bibliography)!
  • Entries should have only the required metadata fields.
  • Entries should be ordered by Bib key.
• The ultimate source of BibTeX entries is the ACM Digital Library. If the paper cannot be found there, the same conventions should still be followed.

BibTeX fields

Bib keys

Bib keys must follow the Author:year:VENUE format, where

• Author is the name of the first author (capitalized and with accents removed).
• In case the same first author has multiple publications in the given year at the same venue, they should be distinguished by adding an a, b, c, ... suffix to the year. E.g., Smith:2010a:SIGIR, Smith:2010b:SIGIR.
• Possible values for venue may be (with this exact capitalization):
  • Conference paper: acronym (AAAI, ACL, CIKM, ECIR, EMNLP, ICTIR, KDD, NeurIPS, SIGIR, TREC, WSDM, WWW, etc.)
  • Workshop paper: workshop acronym if a well-established series (LDOW) or corresponding conference acronym suffixed by -ws (WWW-ws); both options are acceptable and are left to the author's best judgment (and also to check whether a more suitable reference --e.g., conference or journal follow-up paper-- may be found).
  • Journal article: acronym (CS, FnTIR, IR, IRJ, TIST, TOIS, SIGIRForum, etc.)
  • arXiv paper: arXiv
  • Book: Book
  • PhD thesis: PhDThesis

The naming of paper files should follow the same naming conventions, except that all fields are lowercased and dash is used as separator, i.e., author-year-venue.pdf, e.g., smith-2020-sigir.pdf.

Citing conference/workshop papers

• Fields to include:
  • author
  • title
  • booktitle
  • series (ACR 'YY that is, acronym space 'year)
  • pages (xx--yy that is, double dash)
  • year
• Not to include: publisher, address, abstract, keywords, doi, url, etc.
• Example

@inproceedings{Zhang:2020:KDD,
  author = {Zhang, Shuo and Balog, Krisztian},
  title = {Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems via User Simulation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery \& Data Mining},
  series = {KDD '20},
  pages = {1512--1520},
  year = {2020}
}

Citing journal papers

• Fields to include:
  • author
  • title
  • journal using full journal name if unlimited references; otherwise save space using ISO 4 abbreviation wherever available for all words that have standardized abbreviations thereby.
  • volume
  • number
  • pages (xx--yy that is, double dash)
  • year
• Not to include: publisher, address, abstract, keywords, doi, url, etc.
• Example

@article{Sanderson:2010:FnTIR,
  author = {Sanderson, Mark},
  title = {Test Collection Based Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems},
  journal = {Found. Trends Inf. Retr.},
  volume = {4},
  number = {4},
  pages = {247--375},
  year = {2010}
}

Citing arXiv papers

Depending on the paper style, arXiv papers may need different type and metadata fields.

Preferred format (works for ACM)

• Paper type is misc!
• Fields to include:
  • author
  • title
  • archivePrefix = {arXiv}
  • eprint = {PAPER_ID}
  • primaryClass = {...} (e.g., cs.IR, cs.CL, etc.)
  • year
• Not to include: journal, url, volume
• Example

@misc{Balog:2020:arXiv,
  author = {Krisztian Balog and Lucie Flekova and Matthias Hagen and Rosie Jones and Martin Potthast and Filip Radlinski and Mark Sanderson and Svitlana Vakulenko and Hamed Zamani},
  title = {Common Conversational Community Prototype: Scholarly Conversational Assistant},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  eprint = {2001.06910},
  primaryClass = {cs.IR},
  year = {2020}
}

Less preferred format (needed for Springer)

• Paper type is article!
• Fields to include:
  • author
  • title
  • journal = {arXiv}
  • volume = {cs.CL/PAPER_ID}
  • year
• Not to include: eprint, primaryClass, url
• Example

@article{Balog:2020:arXiv,
  author    = {Krisztian Balog and Lucie Flekova and Matthias Hagen and Rosie Jones and Martin Potthast and Filip Radlinski and Mark Sanderson and Svitlana Vakulenko and Hamed Zamani},
  title     = {Common Conversational Community Prototype: Scholarly Conversational
              Assistant},
  journal   = {arXiv},
  volume    = {cs.CL/2001.06910},
  year      = {2020},
}

Citing books

• Fields to include:
  • author
  • title
  • publisher
  • year
• Optional
  • series
  • volume
• Not to include: address, doi, isbn, url, etc.
• Example

@book{Balog:2018:Book,
  author = {Krisztian Balog},
  title = {Entity-Oriented Search},
  series = {The Information Retrieval Series},
  volume = {39},
  publisher = {Springer},
  year = {2018}
}

Citing PhD theses

• Fields to include:
  • author
  • title
  • school
  • year
• Not to include: address, doi, isbn, url, etc.
• Example

@phdthesis{Maxwell:2019:PhDThesis,
  author = {Maxwell, David Martin},
  title = {Modelling search and stopping in interactive information retrieval},
  school = {University of Glasgow},
  year = {2019}
}  

Citing URLs

• Add a BibTeX entry when citing documentation; if you just need to include an URL of a website/code/dataset, use a footnote instead (if there is an associated paper, then cite that one as well, in addition to the footnote).
• Example

@misc{Rasa:2022:doc,
  author = {Rasa Technologies Inc.},
  title = {Rasa Documentation},
  year = {2022},
  url = {https://rasa.com/docs/rasa/},
  note = {Accessed: 2022-01-25}
}

Natbib

• Always use natbib!
• Use \citet{} is for textual citation. For example, \citet{Smith:2000:ABC} proposed ... => Smith et al. (2000) proposed...
• Use \citep{} for parenthetical citation. For example, In \citet{Smith:2000:ABC} the idea of ... => In [2] the idea of...
• Never write out Smith et al., there is a \citeauthor{} command for that (but most likely what you're looking for is actually \citet{}).