Suggested BibTeX standards and tips

Appendix B)  

B.1) Citation tags

The citation tags in the submitted bibliographies will be
replaced with tags that are generated AUTOMATICALLY by our
software.  Our goal is to maintain UNIQUENESS of citation tags in
a growing collection that is prepared by independent authors.

For those who are interested, the citation tags look like

  FirstAuthorLastName:year:key-phrase

with the FirstAuthorLastName capitalized (all caps if an
acronym), and the key-phrase a (possibly hyphenated) phrase in
upper case.  The year is always a 4-digit value.  The key-phrase
is constructed from the initial letters of the first three
capitalized names in the title, ignoring articles and
prepositions.

B.2) Abbreviations: @String{...}

Use of the @String{...} abbreviation facility is important, and
encouraged for consistency and compactness of bibliographic data.
Since the current version of BibTeX has no @Include{} facility, it is
not yet possible to share collections of common @String{} definitions,
but the @String{} definitions that are referred in a BibTeX file have
to be explicitly included in it.

We recommend using @String{...} abbreviations where there is likely to
be data reuse, such as in the following cases:

- institution names
- institution addresses
- journal names
- month names (3-letter abbreviations built-in in BibTeX)
- publisher names
- publisher addresses

The general rules for @String{} abbreviations are as follows:

- Journals should always be named using an explicit string definition of
  the form j-XYZ (avoid the limited BibTeX built-in journal names).
- Publishers should similarly be named with a string definition
  of the form pub-XYZ, and their addresses in the form pub-XYZ:adr.

We strongly recommend adherence to a common set of abbreviations.
A substantial collection of @String{} abbreviations for journals,
institutions, and publishers can be found in the files

      bibnet/tools/strings/journal.bib
      bibnet/tools/strings/institut.bib
      bibnet/tools/strings/mrabbrev.bib
      bibnet/tools/strings/publish.bib

You may propose abbreviations for journals, institutions,
and publishers that are not contained in the database to:

      bibnet-feedback@math.utah.edu


B.3) Other suggested standards and tips

- Article entries should include the full title with original
  capitalization, starting and ending page numbers, volume,
  number, and month, as well as the usual author, journal, and
  year.  The titles are particularly important, because they are
  the material most heavily used in automated database lookups.

- Internet addresses and filenames should be entered with the \path
  macro, for example:

     \path|rms@prep.ai.mit.edu|.

  The \path macro is available for TeX and LaTeX in
  bibnet/tools/path.sty.  It is similar to LaTeX's \verb macro,
  but permits hyphenless linebreaking at punctuation characters.

- Em dashes in titles should use the control sequence \emdash, rather
  than ---; \emdash allows line breaking on either side.  \emdash (and
  others) is defined in the file bibnet/tools/examples/bibnames.sty.

- Oren Patashnik (BibTeX's author) recommends against using ties (~)
  ANYWHERE in the bibliography; BibTeX puts them in where needed.


B.4) Verification

Finally, to track versions and allow verification of file correctness,
we encourage the use of file headers of the type used in the files

      bibnet/tools/strings/*.bib
      bibnet/authors/*/*.{bib,ltx}

A GNU Emacs package for support of these headers is available in a
separate distribution in

      bibnet/tools/emacs/filehdr*.*

This includes Emacs info online documentation, and typeset
documentation.

The checksum program that is used to provide machine-independent
checksumming is available in

      bibnet/tools/software/checksum-*.*

A version of the filehdr package for VMS eve/tpu is available on
request.