[Tex/LaTex] Software-generated bibliographic entries: common errors and other mistakes to check before use

Question

Background Story:
While answering bibliography questions on this site, I often come across incorrect bibliography entries – most of the time they were automatically generated by

• Google Scholar
• Mendeley
• ADS
• Journal websites
• …

Question:

What are notorious problems of automatically generated bib entries? Which things to check before using?

To get a useful sorting please vote for the problems you often encounter / find most important (at the moment all answers are Community Wiki so it does not affect the reputation of the users).

Alphabetic list of topics:

• Abstract or other extraneous data

• Acronyms in titles

• archivePrefix

• Author list

• Bracing

• Bracing the family names

• Content

• Corporate authors

• Custom macros/strings

• Escaping special characters

• HTML (including character codes)

• Incorrect entry type

• Month

• Non-ASCII characters

• Surnames that consist of more than one word

• Ranges

• Uppercase letters

• URL

• year vs. date

Answer 1

Author list

Some common problems:

• Are the authors' names spelled correctly? Are all accents correct? Are all language specific characters correct, i.e. ñ in Spanish, å in Nordic languages, č in Czech, and so on? Is the capitalisation correct (see also https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386066/36296 and https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386068/36296) ?
• Confusion between first and second names
• Confusion between what's the surname component and the given-names component. E.g., for the author named "Marco Del Negro", the author field should be written either as author = "Del Negro, Marco" or author = "Marco {Del Negro}".
• name parts like van, von, de, junior, senior are placed incorrectly

• For entries with two or more authors, failure to use the keyword and as the separator between names. For instance, the following field uses commas inappropriately:

  author = {{Sudipto Bhattacharya, CAE Goodhart, Dimitrios Tsomocos}, 
             Alexandros Vardoulakis},
  

  It should be

  author = {Sudipto Bhattacharya and C. A. E. Goodhart and 
            Dimitrios Tsomocos and Alexandros Vardoulakis},
  

• be consistent with spacing between multiple initials, e.g. sometimes they are exported as Smith, M.~L. while others do Smith, M.L., or Smith, M. L..

  • Most well-written BibTeX styles and biblatex treat Smith, M. L. and Smith, M.~L. alike, so there is rarely something to be won using ~ between name initials. Smith, M.L. on the other hand will not be recognised as a name with two first name initials, but rather as only one very unusual first name "M.L.", which may be abbreviated to "M.".