[Tex/LaTex] Warning — there’s a number but no series in

bibtexnatbib

I am getting this warning in the bibliography. 

BibTeX> Warning -- there's a number but no series in "AAK04"

I don't have series information on this particular conference proceedings but can't get rid of the warning.

This is the particular entry – 

@CONFERENCE{AAK04,
  author =       {Agarwal, R. and Kornhauser, A.A.},
  title =        {Energy Balance for a Direct Carbon Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell},
  booktitle =    {ASME Heat Transfer / Fluids Engineering Summer Conference},
  address =      {Charlotte},
  number =       {HT-FED2004-56887},
  year =         {2004},
  series =   {}
  }

And this is the entry in the main document using the database.bib file. 

\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{database}

Could anyone tell me what is wrong here or how to correct it?

I am using TeXnicCenter and MikTeX package.

UPDATE 7/6/14

As per @egreg recommendation which made sense, I've changed the entry in .bib file to this:

@CONFERENCE{AAK04,
  author =       {Agarwal, R. and Kornhauser, A.A.},
  title =        {Energy Balance for a Direct Carbon Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell},
  booktitle =    {ASME Heat Transfer / Fluids Engineering Summer Conference},
  volume =       {3},
  address =      {Charlotte},
  note =         {Paper no. HT-FED2004-56887},
  year =         {2004}
  }

My output is like this:

R. Agarwal and A.A. Kornhauser. Energy balance for a direct carbon molten carbonate
fuel cell. In ASME Heat Transfer / Fluids Engineering Summer Conference,
volume 3, Charlotte, 2004. Paper no. HT-FED2004-56887.

Also, the original issue in this post was regarding the warning. The warning is because number and series go together for "conference" or "inproceedings" but not for "journal" where volume and number go together. This is the inference I could draw in case somebody encounters this issue.

Best Answer

The field number refers to a series of books (for instance, Academic Press' “Pure and Applied Mathematics”) or the issue number of a journal's volume. Probably HT-FED2004-56887 should go in a note field, with an explanation of its meaning; in the ASME site it is presented as “Paper number” and is part of the DOI, which is doi:10.1115/HT-FED2004-56887.

Unfortunately the plainnat style doesn't support a doi field. You can do

@inproceedings{AAK04,
  author =       {Agarwal, R. and Kornhauser, A.A.},
  title =        {Energy Balance for a Direct Carbon Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell},
  booktitle =    {ASME Heat Transfer / Fluids Engineering Summer Conference},
  volume =       {3},
  address =      {Charlotte},
  note =         {Paper no. HT-FED2004-56887},
  year =         {2004}
  }

and, if you don't want the note field to appear, just change note into OPTnote or any other inexistent field name.

The conference type is the same as inproceedings, I just prefer the latter.

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