For more information on writing BibTeX entries read BibTeX Entry Types
For more information about ApJ bibliography and citation styles read ApJ References Citations in Text
For more infomation on citations, and all the various ways to enter citations (I only cover a small number of them here), read Using natbib with AASTeX written by the AAS (a combination of natbib and the style file for the bibliography allow all the various forms of \citet and \citep).
PSUThesis uses BibTeX to create the bibliography for your thesis. In order to use BibTeX, you first need to create a bibliography database. The database is very easy to make assuming the papers you are citing have entries on ADS, because ADS will generate a BibTeX entry and link to it from the abstract page.
Here are the steps to create a bib file:
- Start with a blank text tile in your favorite text editor, call it something like "bibs.bib" (the name can be whatever you want, so long as it ends in ".bib").
- To add an entry for "Morgan & Keenan, 1973, ARA&A, 11, 29", first search for it in ADS (using whatever method you prefer), eventually you will arrive at the abstract page
- On the abstract page, scroll down past the abstract, and you will see a link to Bibtex entry for this abstract
- Click on the BibTeX entry link and copy this entry to your bib
file:
@ARTICLE{1973ARA&A..11...29M, author = {{Morgan}, W.~W. and {Keenan}, P.~C.}, title = "{Spectral Classification}", journal = {\araa}, year = 1973, volume = 11, pages = {29-+}, adsurl = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1973ARA%26A..11...29M&db_key=AST}, adsnote = {Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System} } - You will want to change the first line after the "{"
and before the "," to a different citation key (whatever
you put there is what you'll have to put in all the \citet{} and
\citep{} in your document, so make it something short and easy to
remember), for example I would change it to:
@ARTICLE{MK73, author = {{Morgan}, W.~W. and {Keenan}, P.~C.}, title = "{Spectral Classification}", journal = {\araa}, year = 1973, volume = 11, pages = {29-+}, adsurl = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1973ARA%26A..11...29M&db_key=AST}, adsnote = {Provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data System} } - Enter any other papers in whatever order you want then save your bib file. (Hint: do not leave any blank lines between entries, if you would like "blank lines" to separate entries, start them with a " % " to comment them out)
A Word of Caution about ADS and Conference Proceedings...
If you are citing conference proceedings and take the bibtex entry from ADS, for some reason they do not add the "editor" or "publisher" information in their bibtex entry. You will need to enter these by hand. The information is included on the abstract page, just add two lines into the bibtex entry, such as:
editor = {J.\ Smith},
publisher = {Conference Publishers R.\ Us.},
Be sure to inclose the entries with " { } " and end the line with a comma. The ApJ bibliography format will pick up these two entries and include them in your thesis bibliography.
Now, to compile you paper and generate a bibliography (for the first time, after referencing a new paper for the first time, or removing all references to a paper):
- Run latex on your paper (you'll get a bunch of citation errors - that's OK): "latex mypaper"
- Run bibtex on you paper (important: be sure to leave off the ".tex" extension!!!): "bibtex mypaper" -- this will generate the file "mypaper.bbl" which contains your formated bibliography
- Rerun latex on you paper (you will need to do this a couple times to get all the citations and cross-references correct).
- If you add/remove citations in the future, you will need to repeat these steps to update the bbl file
Note: you can hand-edit the bbl file to make any minor tweaks you want (however, be warned that the next time you run bibtex it will overwrite the bbl file and thus destroy any tweaks you made --- so it's probably best not to tweak it until you are absolutely certain that all the references are included).
A quick note about citation references
BibTeX uses the \citet, \citep, and \nocite references in your paper to determine what references to included in the bibliography from your master bib file. General usage:
- \citet{<cite key>} = in-text citation, as in: Morgan & Keenan (1973)
- \citep{<cite key>} = parenthetical citation, as in: (Morgan & Keenan 1973)
- \nocite{<cite key>} = adds nothing to the text, but lets bibtex know that you want a citation included in the bibliography, in the document you may type: "As was shown in Morgan & Keenan (1973)\nocite{MK73} ..."
If you would like to type in all your references by hand (rather than using the \citet, \citep referencing), then in order for BibTeX to know what to include in the bibliography, you will need to enter: "\nocite{<bib citation keys separated by commas>}" somewhere in your document.
Other fun facts:
- Three author papers --- the traditional way to deal with three author papers is to list all three authors the first time you cite the paper, then use "first author, et al." each subsequent citation. BibTeX has a * version of \citet and \citep that accomplishes this. The first time you cite a three person paper, use "\citet*{<cite key>}" or "\citep*{<cite key>}", this will cause LaTeX to include all three author names. Then each subsequent time you cite the same three author paper, just use "\citet{<cite key>}" or "\citep{<cite key>}" which will cause LaTeX to list only the first author followed by et al. Caveat: the * form will also list all authors for papers with more than three authors. So be careful if you are combining multiple references into a single cite* command.
- Authors with "von part" names --- for author names like "von Braun" or "de la Maire", in the rare instance that a citation for this author starts a sentence (i.e., "Von Braun (2000) said that..."), then it needs to appear capitalized as "Von Braun", to get that to happen, use "\Citet" (or you could just type it out by hand and use \nocite).
- Adding other words to parenthetical citations --- for
instance you want a cite to say: "(see Morgan & Keenan
1973)" or "(Morgan & Keenan 1973, give examples of
this)"; \citep has square-bracket optional parts to add this
additional text: "\citep[text before citation][text after the
citation]{<cite key>}". Examples:
- (see Morgan & Keenan 1973) = \citep[see][]{MK73}
- (Morgan & Keenan 1973, give examples of this) = \citep[][give example of this]{MK73}
- (see Morgan & Keenan 1973, for more examples) = \citep[see][for more examples]{MK73}
- To change the punctuation that appears in a citation ---
use the following command in the document preamble:
\bibpunct[<optional>]{<1>}{<2>}{<3>}{<4>}{<5>}{<6>}
- the opening bracket symbol, default = (
- the closing bracket symbol, default = )
- the punctuation between multiple citations, default = ;
- one of the following letters: 'n' = numerical style, 's' = numerical superscript style, any other letter (i.e., 'a') for author-year; default = author-year
- the punctuation that comes between the author names and the year
- the punctuation that comes between the years or numbers when common author names are suppressed, default = , (i.e., as in "Jones 2000, 2001")
- The command "\bibpunct{(}{)}{;}{a}{}{,}" is already included in the example "mythesis.tex" file. This command makes citations like, "\citep[][and references therein]{mk73,jones02,jones03}", look like: "(Morgan & Keenan 1973; Jones et al. 2002, 2003, and references therein)"
- If the comma before the post-note offends you, then change it with the optional argument. For example, using "\bibpunct[; ]{(}{)}{;}{a}{}{,}" will make the previous example now look like: "(Morgan & Keenan 1973; Jones et al. 2002, 2003; and references therein)"