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BibTeX
BibTeX is the very imperfect but still best way to handle bibliographic databases for $\mathrm{\TeX}$/$\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ users.
Our bibliographic sci/Sci files
If you are working with us, you may want or be called to use our bib files.
The most important one is called sci.bib (all lowercase letters), and each entry follows the following pattern:
@Article{aspect82a,
author = {A. Aspect and J. Dalibard and G. Roger},
title = {Experimental Test of {Bell}'s Inequalities Using Time-Varying Analyzers},
journal = prl,
year = 1982,
volume = 49,
pages = 1804,
url = {doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.1804},
pdf = {sci/aspect82a}
}
That is, entries are Article (if it's, e.g., a book, it goes in a separate file), with a key built as follow:
- name-of-first-author⇿two-last-digits-of-year-of-publication⇿$\alpha$
where ⇿ means concatenation and $\alpha$ runs over the alphabet to discriminate publications from the first author in the same year. If another Aspect's paper of 1982 exists, it will be inserted as aspect82b. The $\alpha$ ordering comes from the order in which it is entered in this database, not from the chronological order along which the authors have published their work.
If you need to add an entry to contribute to this database, please adhere to the following format, providing the following fields (and only those):
- author
- The list of authors, with initials (A. Aspect, not Alain Aspect)
- title
- The title
- journal
- The journal, using a keyword defined in the preamble, i.e., prl (without { }) for Phys. Rev. Lett. (it is defined through @string{prl = "Phys. Rev. Lett."} at the beginning of the file). Look for the journal that you need to quote in this way, do not write directly {Phys. Rev. Lett} or even worst, {prl}, which will not expand the string.
- year
- The year of publication
- volume
- The volume of the publication
- pages
- The first page of the publication, using the encoding of the journal (e.g., with R or S for Rapid, etc.)
- url
- The Digital Object Identifier System of the publication. You can find it looking for the keyword "doi". It should be in the format {doi:here.the.number}
- pdf
- The link to the electronic file associated stored locally. It should be in the format {sci/key} where key is the key of the BibTeX entry (so aspect82a in this case). In the folder sci/, that you may, or may not have, there is a copy of this file. As you add an entry, you must provide the file as well (you should not be able to quote a document to which you do not have access).
The sci.bib is the mother file. We use scripts to process this file into a Sci.bib (Uppercase) which you should not edit directly. It is the one that is fed to the journal (removing url, links to the papers, etc.)
The sci.bib is a huge file, with other 20 thousand lines, several thousands of entries with many corrections. It is a powerful work that facilitates a messy business. If you need a last version, please ask one.
The way it works is, we usually provide co-authors with the Sci.bib for use in papers, and we maintain the mother sci.bib. To avoid conflicts, we add ourselves entries that you may contribute to the main file. So we recommend you use a new .bib file, use the format described above (you can read the key from the Sci file to know how to update the $\alpha$ value) and send to us your new (and presumably, small) file. We also have scripts to merge this with the core database.
bibSQL
I have my own mySQL version of BibTeX, of which you can learn in its own page bibSQL.
Hacking the .bbl
BibTeX ultimately produces a bbl file. If you want to provide fine-control tuning, you can edit this file. Of course, any compiling of BibTeX will overwrite your changes, so they should be kept in a separate script file to run anew each time you recompile.
Some examples:
- If you want to go two-columns, you can add multicol in the bbl.
- If you want to add some text you can do so with a \hbox in the references list:
