[Tex/LaTex] Best practice for BibTeX entries with paper number rather than page number

bibtex

When conference proceedings or journals are published online and papers are not given page numbers but paper numbers, what is the standard way to incorporate this information into a BibTeX entry? I often see it incorporated under the optional field pages, but many bibliography styles render this as 'p. N' which gives the impression it is a one page paper (or the author failed to clean up the references). I could of course use note={24}, which will be visually correct. I am not asking how to produce the desired visual effect, but what is the canonical approach to storing the information for optimal reuse.

Example BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{yu2007may,
  title={How May E-Learning Groups Interact?},
  author={Yu, Chia-Ping and Kuo, Feng-Yang},
  booktitle={AMCIS 2007 Proceedings},
  pages={24},
  year={2007}
}

Recommended citation style:

Yu, Chia-Ping and Kuo, Feng-Yang, "How May {E}-Learning Groups Interact?" (2007). AMCIS 2007 Proceedings. 24.

Actual format of citation, using bibliography style IEEEtran:

C.-P. Yu and F.-Y. Kuo, "How may E-learning groups interact?," in AMCIS 2007 Proceedings, 2007, p. 24.

Format of the citation with note={24} instead of page={24}, in IEEEtrans:

C.-P. Yu and F.-Y. Kuo, "How may E-learning groups interact?," in AMCIS 2007 Proceedings, 2007, 24.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, there is no canonical solution here. The base BibTeX styles were written back in the late eighties when URLs and electronic journal publishing were not really a thing and journal articles and conference proceedings mostly had page numbers, so there was no need to mark up "article numbers" or "paper numbers".

Since the core styles have no provision for this, many contributed styles also don't — and if they have something, they roll their own solution; there is no standard that would encompass more styles than that of a family or of the same author.

biblatex knows the eid field, but even there I can't promise that all contributed styles make use of it as intended.

You will have to decide if the output looks OK on a case-by-case basis, I'm afraid.

As it so happens, you mention IEEEtran which has a paper field for @inproceedings that can be used here. That field is by no means universal and I have not seen it before, but it should hopefully give the expected output here.

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