I am starting a PhD, so reading papers and writing notes about them will be my routine for some months. I like to be organized so I try to add the interesting publications to a bib file. However, when writing my master dissertation, I didn't know how to organize my citation keys. I had some keys like paper:smith03, others like master:goodwin97a and even paper:john2008adaptivealg.
I initially thought that type:first lastname:year was a good start but it then got a little out of control when I added authors that had the same last name or when the same author published many papers in the same year. I then tought about type:first lastname:year:first couple of words of publication, but it seemed to long, over-explained like the Hungarian notation of a variable (my initial approach was already a bit Hungarian-ish)
My question is: do you have any tips or good citation keys for bibtex entries?
Best Answer
I keep all my references in a simple scheme, like {authorYear}, e.g. smith00 (no need for full year -- in my field all the interesting work starts from 1960s). If necessary, I add a suffix "-2", "-3", etc. when multiple papers are available from the same author in a given year. With short and common names (such as those of people of East Asian origin), I usually add the second author's name as well, e.g. leejung08 (Lee and Jung, 2008)
The main good thing is that most references are short and easy enough and I can remember them exactly after a few repetitions without consulting the bibliography database.
I never had problems with keeping up, even though my bibliography database contains 200 or so entries. With a good bibliography manager, I never spend more than a few seconds finding whatever reference I need, especially when you're able to navigate quickly through it to the electronic resource (PDF, web link, DOI).
Paper organization tip: I mark all my printed papers with the same key as the BibTeX keys, and when kept at alphabetical order, you can easily find the one you need.
Update: Rename all your electronic publications (you do keep them offline, don't you?) using the BibteX key as a filename (nothing worse having a directory full of files with names that look like Perl code). (Hat tip to @Seamus for the reminder).