[Tex/LaTex] Definitive advice on BibTeX entries for online material

bibtex

I'm new (i.e. today!) to LaTex, and am assembling resources for a .bib file using the BibTex online editor (with the help of my more LaTex-savvy partner).

There's no entry category for online articles and resources, so after some research the advice seems to be either use a url field in @MISC, @ARTICLE or @ELECTRONIC. I also found two articles that suggest using @ONLINE, but this seems like an outlier and I'm not sure if it's widely supported?

I've already noticed that the LaTex community can offer varying solutions to a single problem, so I need to know the simplest and—if it exists—the canonical way to cite online sources, with a field for 'last accessed'.

Update

Here's my @ONLINE template (formatting borrowed from the online editor mentioned above):

@ONLINE {refkey,
    author    = "",
    title     = "",
    publisher = "",
    month     = "",
    year      = "",
    url       = "http://",
    urldate   = "YYYY-MM-DD"
}

Best Answer

Over the years, many packages have been written to do some special bibliography stuff. Urls and DOIs became prominent over the years, and some bibliographystyles have added features to actually cite online material.

With biblatex we have a modern package that tries to implement all the functunality of the various packages in just one LaTeX package. It provides a dedicated entrytype for online resources.

Citing the package documentation, version 3.0:

online An online resource. author, editor and year are omissible in terms of § Missing and Omissible Data This entrytype is intended for sources such as web sites which are intrisically online resources. Note that all entry types support the url field. For example, when adding an article from an online journal, it may be preferable to use the @article type and its url field.

Required fields: author/editor, title, year/date, url

Optional fields, subtitle, titleaddon, language, version, note, organization, date, month, year, addendum, pubstate, urldate

If you have the freedom to choose biblatex over any other citation package, feel lucky. On the other hand, contributing to a journal can be a problem. Why update a workflow that is working?

Most journals still use BibTeX with classical bibliography styles. As biblatex was adding new features, not everything in a database will be reusable. Thinking about this at the beginning will save you some trouble later.

Related Question