[Tex/LaTex] URL date access missing

bibtexurl

I am using a Mendeley bibtex file in my LaTex document and my citations include journal articles and websites. When I compile my document, the bibliography entry for the website does not show the 'URL date accessed'. Can you advise on how I can include this please?

I attach my bibtex code, bibliography file and pdf output. I am using Texworks (version 0.6.2) downloaded from MikTex (version 2.9)

LaTex doc.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\begin{document}
Test 1
\cite{Nature2017}

\bibliography{library}
\end{document}

PDF output

Bibtex

@misc{Nature2017,
howpublished = {https://www.nature.com/nature/},
title = {{Nature}},
url = {https://www.nature.com/nature/},
urldate = {02/12/17}
}

I can't seem to find a solution online so any help you can give will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance.

Best Answer

The plain bibliography style is one of the "orginal" BibTeX bibliography styles, and it's been around more or less unchanged since the mid-1980s. As such, it wasn't set up to do anything with fields called url and urldate, in no small part because the Internet didn't even exist yet and acronyms such as URL were but an idea in Tim Berners-Lee's mind. Do consider using a more modern bibliography style, i.e., one that at least recognizes the field url.

Assuming that, for some reason, you're stuck with having to use the plain bibliography style, I suggest you transfer the contents of both the url and urldate fields to a field called notes (and lose the howpublished field, since it just repeats the URL-related information). And, be sure to load the url and/or hyperref packages in order to activate the \url macro.

enter image description here

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{library.bib}
@misc{Nature2017,
title = {Nature},
note  = {\url{https://www.nature.com/nature/}, last accessed on 02/12/17},
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\usepackage[hyphens,spaces]{url}

\begin{document}
\cite{Nature2017}
\bibliography{library}
\end{document}