You need to use a modern .bst
file; plain.bst
is not going to cut it, I'm afraid. In plain
and the other "classic" BibTeX style files, the only fields contained in a misc
entry that are printed out are author
, title
, howpublished
, date
, and note
. All other fields -- including url
and accessed
-- are ignored. Hence the need for a more recent bibliography style.
Which bibliography style should you choose? Since you haven't indicated what your formatting requirements are, I can't give any definitive advice. You may want to start out with the plainnat
bibliography style. (This means, by the way, that you will also need to load the natbib
package, but you may be doing so already.) You should probably also be loading the url
package to let LaTeX find convenient line break points in a long URL string.
By the way, the date
field in a misc
entry is a bit unusual. (At least that's the case when it's processed by plainnat.
) For your purposes, I think it's best if you omit the date
field entirely and, instead, include the day-of-the-month information in the month
field; i.e., set month = "9 April"
for the entry at hand.
Be aware that the misc
entry (at least when used with the plainnat
style) does not recognize a field named accessed
. However, things will work out well if you (i) replace the accessed
field name with note
and (ii) place the word "Accessed" inside the note
field's argument. Assuming, then, that you go with plainnat
or a similar bibliography style, the bib entry should probably look something like this:
@misc{Peston2010,
author = "Peston, Robert",
title = "The Digital Economy Bill",
url = "www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8604602.stm",
year = 2010,
month = "9 April",
note = "Accessed 8 February 2012",
}
With this entry stored in the file myref.bib
, say, the following MWE
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{natbib}
\usepackage{url}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\begin{document}
\citet{Peston2010}, \citep{Peston2010}
\bibliography{myref} % myref.bib contains the entry keyed to 'Peston2010'
\end{document}
produces this output:
Two final comments: (i) If you don't want BibTeX to lowercase the words in the title
field, you should enclose the words in question in curly braces. (ii) If you want the citations generated by natbib
's \citet
and \citep
commands to use round parentheses rather than square brackets, load the natbib
package with the option "round", as in \usepackage[round]{natbib}
.
I have no problems with this slightly changed file:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}% <-- useful for embedding external files in the main file
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@MISC{maldives,
author = {Connoly, Darlene},
title = {Controversy in the Maldives},
editor = {Surfline.com},
month = {August},
year = {2012},
url = {http://www.surfline.com/surf-news/maldives-surf-access-controversy-update_75296/},
note = {[Online; posted 27-August-2012]},
}
@MISC{maldives-alt,
author = {Connoly, Darlene},
title = {Controversy in the Maldives},
editor = {Surfline.com},
month = {August},
year = {2012},
note = {\href{http://www.surfline.com/surf-news/maldives-surf-access-controversy-update_75296/}{Surfline.com} {[Online; posted 27-August-2012]}},
}
@MISC{mull,
author = {Mull, Jeff},
title = {Maldives Controversy},
editor = {Surfing Magazine},
month = {September},
year = {2010},
url = {http://www.surfermag.com/features/maldives-controversy/},
note = {[Online; posted 13-September-2012]},
}
\end{filecontents*}
\usepackage{natbib}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage[colorlinks]{hyperref}
\begin{document}
Please refer to \cite{maldives} and \cite{mull}.
And this citation `hides' the link `in the url portion of the citation': \cite{maldives-alt}.
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}
Best Answer
You wrote,
You mention that you use the
plos2015
bibliography style. The fileplos2015.bst
defines themisc
function, which governs how entries of type@misc
are formatted, as follows:We needn't cover all the details. What's crucial for answering your question is the line
You can probably guess what this line of code would do if it were not commented out: It would govern the typesetting of the contents of the
note
field. Since the instruction has been commented out, though, the contents ofnote
fields in entries of type@misc
will not be typeset. That's it.Or is it? If you believe strongly that it's essential to typeset the contents of
note
fields, you could remove the%
character, i.e., re-enable the instruction, and then rerun BibTeX and LaTeX. However, do be aware of the fact that once you submit your paper to PLOS1 (or a similar journal), the contents of thenote
field will once again disappear.