Can I have a bibtex entry with space in its key reference? Like below:
@article{Author 2000,
title={Boring book},
author={Boring Guy},
journal={Boring Subject},
year={2000},
publisher={Bororing Pub.}
}
So my tex source can look like this and be recognized:
...the subject was well studied in \cite{Author 2000}.
Currently, if I run bibtex in this way I get an error:
White space in argument---line 67 of file file.aux
: \citation{Author
: 2000}
I understand what is the problem in this error, and I realise I can fix it going to my entries and changing it to an entry without the spacing. However, I was wondering if there was another solution.
Can I cite references containing spacing? Like \cite{Author 2000}
Best Answer
Neither spaces nor commas are allowed in the key references. (Recall that commas are the separator characters between fields in a bibtex entry.) Non-ASCII characters are not suitable either for use in key references if the bib file is processed by BibTeX(8).
Biber, which is newer than BibTeX, could in principle handle non-ASCII characters in the key reference. However, if preserving usability of the bib file with both BibTeX and Biber is an objective for you, you should definitely avoid using non-ASCII characters in the key reference.