Software-generated bibliographic entries: common errors and other mistakes to check before use

Author list

Some common problems:

  • Are the authors' names spelled correctly? Are all accents correct? Are all language specific characters correct, i.e. ñ in Spanish, å in Nordic languages, č in Czech, and so on? Is the capitalisation correct (see also https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386066/36296 and https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386068/36296) ?
  • Confusion between first and second names
  • Confusion between what's the surname component and the given-names component. E.g., for the author named "Marco Del Negro", the author field should be written either as author = "Del Negro, Marco" or author = "Marco {Del Negro}".
  • name parts like van, von, de, junior, senior are placed incorrectly

  • For entries with two or more authors, failure to use the keyword and as the separator between names. For instance, the following field uses commas inappropriately:

    author = {{Sudipto Bhattacharya, CAE Goodhart, Dimitrios Tsomocos}, 
           Alexandros Vardoulakis},

    It should be

    author = {Sudipto Bhattacharya and C. A. E. Goodhart and 
          Dimitrios Tsomocos and Alexandros Vardoulakis},

  • be consistent with spacing between multiple initials, e.g. sometimes they are exported as Smith, M.~L. while others do Smith, M.L., or Smith, M. L..

    • Most well-written BibTeX styles and biblatex treat Smith, M. L. and Smith, M.~L. alike, so there is rarely something to be won using ~ between name initials. Smith, M.L. on the other hand will not be recognised as a name with two first name initials, but rather as only one very unusual first name "M.L.", which may be abbreviated to "M.".

Failure to treat corporate-author cases properly in author and editor fields

Consider the following three author fields:

author = {National Aeronautics and Space Administration},
author = {Bureau of Labor Statistics},
author = {International Monetary Fund},

All three are instances of "corporate" authors. The correct way to write them is

author = {{National Aeronautics and Space Administration}},
author = {{Bureau of Labor Statistics}},
author = {{International Monetary Fund}},

Without this special treatment, the first author field will be parsed as having two separate authors -- recall that and is a keyword in author and editor fields! -- called "National Aeronautics" and "Space Administration", respectively. The second author will be parsed as having "of" as the "von component" and hence a two-component surname ("Labor Statistics") and a single given name ("Bureau"). The third author would be parsed as having surname "Fund" and given names "International" and "Monetary"! Moreover, if the bibliographic entries are sorted alphabetically, the first entry would be sorted under "A" for "Aeronautics", the second under "L" for "Labor Statistics", and the third under "F" for "Fund". The correct letters would, of course, be "N", "B", and "I", respectively.

By encasing the entire name in an additional pair of curly braces, BibTeX and biber are led to believe that the authors' names have just one component (the surname component).

In many automatic data bases, corporate authors are already wrongly divided in first and last name parts, so pay attention to any stray letters. An example:

    author = {{Cherenkov Telescope Array Consortium}, T. and [...] and et al.},

where the "The" from the original author list was mistakenly interpreted as first name and abbreviated.


Failure to treat URL strings properly

URL strings frequently are quite long, and they often contain characters -- such as &, #, $, % and _ -- that have special meanings when parsed by TeX. URL strings should either be encased in a \url{...} wrapper (be sure to load the url and/or hyperref packages!) or placed in a field called url. (If the bibliography style that's in use recognizes such a field name, it almost certainly "knows" that its contents should be placed in the argument of a \url directive.)

Sometimes one sees machine-generated URL strings in which the TeX-special characters have been prefixed with \ (backslash characters). A real-life example:

url = {http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm{\_}archive/180},

This is awful. Change it to

url = {http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/180},

especially if you intend to make the URL string usable for your readers (which, obviously, you really should intend to do).

Some export tools put the URL into the note field, if you use a style that supports a dedicated url and urldate field (biblatex styles in general do that, url is also supported by some BibTeX styles), you should use those if possible.

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Bibliographies

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