[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX warning on extra title field

bibtexwarnings

I am using TeXnicCenter and MiKTeX for compiling. I have the following BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{cwang10,
author={Cong Wang and Cuirong Wang and Ying Yuan},
booktitle={Cyber-Enabled Distributed Computing and Knowledge Discovery (CyberC), 2010 International Conference on}, 
title={A High Performance, Low-Cost Network Architecture for Data Centers},
year={2010},
month={Oct.},
pages={284--287},
}

However I get a strange warning message that the above entry contains an "extra title field" and that BibTeX is ignoring said field. I have about 120 references.

Can you please help to fix this?

Best Answer

Because of the warning message

Warning--I'm ignoring cwang10's extra "title" field

combined with the fact that you have "about 120" reference entries, I'm almost positive that you've run into BibTeX capacity issues. Quoting sections 2.4.2.1 and 2.4.2.2 of the biblatex (sic!) manual:

With a large bib file which contains several hundred entries, BibTeX is very likely to run out of memory. [...] Unfortunately, traditional BibTeX does not output a clear error message when it runs out of memory but exposes a rather cryptical kind of faulty behavior. The warning messages printed in this case look like this:
Warning--I’m ignoring Jones1995’s extra "year" field
--line 422 of file huge.bib
[...]

These warning messages could indeed indicate that the entry Jones1995 is faulty because it includes two year [...] fields. If that is not the case and the bib file is fairly large, this is most likely a capacity issue. What makes these warnings so confusing is that they are not tied to a specific entry. If you remove the allegedly faulty entry, a different one will trigger similar warnings. This is one reason why switching to bibtex8 [...] is advisable.

[...]

[T]he capacity of [bibtex8] may be increased at run-time via command-line switches and it also prints unambiguous error messages, for example:
17289 fields:
Sorry---you’ve exceeded BibTeX’s total number of fields 17250
[...] The first thing you should always do is run bibtex8 with the --wolfgang switch. Don’t even bother trying anything else.

In other words, try to compile your document using

pdflatex
bibtex8 --wolfgang
pdflatex
pdflatex

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Bibtex: unsrt and crossref

This is a well known design flaw of the BibTeX database format:

inproceedings entries have to provide both, the title field – which defines the title of the respective paper and the booktitle field, which gives the title of, well, the proceedings book.
When you crossref to another entry in BibTex, all fields that have not been set so far are taken from the referred entry. Hence, referring from inproceedings to proceedings imports all fields, but title, which has already been used for the paper title. Afterwards, BibTeX complaints if booktitle is (still) missing.
proceedings entries, however, need their title (like other books) to be given by the title field. It is taken if you refer directly to a proceedings book (like \cite{stackexchange/tex/23122}) or the style does it automatically (to shorten your inproceedings entries).

So the general (but ugly) recommendation (e.g., given by WikiPedia) to be able to use proceedings entries stand-alone as well as crossrefed by inproceedings entries is to state the title twice: once as title and once as booktitle.

Edit:

A less ugly solution to this problem is provided by switching from traditional BibTex to biblatex with the biber backend, as explained in the answer by lockstep.

[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX Warning—-empty title

According to the documentation of natbib, the following could be sufficient to get a style similar to what Nature uses:

\usepackage[super]{natbib}
\bibpunct{}{}{,}{s}{}{\textsuperscript{,}}
\renewcommand\bibnumfmt[1]{#1.}

and then

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}

Other possibilities are unsrtnat or naturemag in place of plainnat.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Bibtex: unsrt and crossref

[Tex/LaTex] BibTeX Warning—-empty title

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