I am learning Bibtex and am doing well with those references which I can find with google scholar. But I need to cite an unpublished preprint Combinatorial Group Theory In Homotopy Theory I by Fred R Cohen, available at his web page.
Is there a standard format for situations like this? I need to cite another preprint which is not even available on web site; I contacted the authors personally to get a copy. How should I cite it using Bibtex in this case?
Hopefully this question is not a duplicate. I tried to search this site and found this related question, but the question is not exactly the same as what I want to ask and there is no answer for the question so far.
Best Answer
(This is a compilation of some of the comments I provided when the query was first posted.)
Since you're using the
plain
bibliography style, you could use either the@unpublished
entry type or the catch-all@misc
entry type for the paper at hand. With either of these two entry types, I suggest you use thenote
field to provide URL and similar information. Incidentally, based on the description you've provided, I would not use the entry type@techreport
for this paper. The@techreport
entry type should be used primarily for items issued as part of a working paper series, discussion paper series, or similarly numbered series of papers. That's why the@techreport
entry type has fields such asinstitution
(required) andtype
andnumber
(optional).Aside: which bibliography style you should -- or must -- use depends importantly on the style guidelines of the journal or outfit you intend to submit your paper to. One of the main advantages of using BibTeX (or, say,
biblatex
) for generating bibliographies and citation call-outs is that it's straightforward to switch between (pre-defined) bibliography styles.Regarding your first follow-up question,
As a general rule, you should always double-check the correctness of all entries you've obtained online. In my experience, even bibliographic information derived from the publishers' own websites isn't 100 percent reliable.
You also asked,
For entries of type
@unpublished
, thenote
field generally contains information about the author's institutional affiliation (if known), a web address, and any other pieces of information which may be important and helpful to the reader and which do not belong in any of the other fields.If you've loaded the
url
and/orhyperref
packages, you could (should, actually...) encase any URL strings insidenote
fields in a\url{...}
directive. E.g., you might writeThis will help LaTeX find a decent line break in the URL string, should It be necessary to do so.