[Tex/LaTex] Citing a website in Overleaf and Zotero

overleafzotero

I just started to use Zotero in Overleaf. When I tried to cite a wiki page, I got an error:

./main.bbl:3:
Missing $ inserted.
<inserted text> 
                $
l.3 \bibitem[_wi, 2016]{_wikipedia:user_2016}

When I check Zotero.bib, I saw that the record starts an underscore, which causes the problem (I tried to manually remove and it solves the problem).

    @misc{_wikipedia:user_2016,
    title = {Wikipedia:{User} pages},
    copyright = {Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License},
    shorttitle = {Wikipedia},
    abstract = {Abstract},
    language = {en},
    urldate = {2016-03-05TZ},
    journal = {Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia},
    month = feb,
    year = {2016},
    note = {Page Version ID: 707348267}
}

How to prevent this problem? Because, doing this manually is not manageable for a larger scale project.

Thank you very much,
Adam

Best Answer

This is a known issue on the Zotero side: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/771. I'm not sure if Overleaf allows you to modify the Zotero bibtex export it uses -- if so, fixing this in the javascript is pretty easy (or, more easily still, you can use the better bibtex add-on. Otherwise you'd have to wait until someone finally gets around to fixing this in Zotero proper. (The underscore gets added because of a missing author, btw. Not that that's a good reason.)

A `biblatex` solution

As I mentioned in the comments, Mico's answer to Internet citation using APA points out that apa-good.bst requires the url. But since the apa-good.bst style I found didn't produce the output you're expecting, I'd suggest biblatex, which has an APA style (called biblatex-apa).

\documentclass{article}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{schroeder_facebook_2012,
  title = {Facebook Hits One Billion Active Users},
  url = {http://mashable.com/2012/10/04/facebook-one-billion/},
  abstract = {Facebook just officially reached one billion active users, Facebook {CEO} and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.},
  urldate = {2013-07-17},
  journal = {Mashable},
  author = {Schroeder, Stan},
  month = oct,
  year = {2012},
}
\end{filecontents}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=apa,backend=biber]{biblatex}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
\parencite{schroeder_facebook_2012}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

biblatex-apa example

Although the output is the same, a more adequate entry type in biblatex would be @online (notice also the date field):

@online{schroeder2012,
  title = {Facebook Hits One Billion Active Users},
  url = {http://mashable.com/2012/10/04/facebook-one-billion/},
  abstract = {Facebook just officially reached one billion active users, Facebook {CEO} and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.},
  urldate = {2013-07-17},
  journal = {Mashable},
  author = {Schroeder, Stan},
  date = {2012-10},
}

N.B. According to the manual (§1, "Important Changes"), biblatex-apa relies on the usage of biber instead of bibtex as the backend (It's the default behavior of biblatex, but I added the corresponding option to the MWE to make it clear).

About moving to biblatex, I'd suggest the following questions:

[Tex/LaTex] citing from zotero for workflow in emacs/AUCTex

Better BibTeX for Zotero allows for automated export to BibTeX/BibLaTeX (a.o.). It's set-and-forget; you export a collection to a file, tick "Keep updated", and Bob's your proverbial uncle. Any changes you make to that collection or its entries will cause a background update of the bib file.

You can have multiple of such exports set up -- BBT implements heavy caching, so most of the time you won't even notice that its busy (except that one user with a crazy 22k entries in a single collection -- that takes a little under a minute).

Full disclosure: I am the author of BBT.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Citing websites in APA style with Zotero

A biblatex solution

[Tex/LaTex] citing from zotero for workflow in emacs/AUCTex

Related Question

A `biblatex` solution