Typing fields

16.1.2 Typing fields

Make sure you type the field names correctly. If you misspell one, B IB TEX ignores the field. B IB TEX also warns you if a required field is missing. The author and editor fields require a name.

Rule

Names

1. Most names can be typed as usual, "Ernest T. Moynahan" or "Moynahan, Ernest T.", with one comma separating the family name from the given names.

2. Type two or more names separated by and. For instance, author= "George Blue and Ernest Brown and Soo-Key Foo",

3. The family name of Miguel Lopez Fernandez is Lopez Fernandez, so type it as "Lopez Fernandez, Miguel". This informs B IB TEX that Lopez is not a middle name.

4. Type Orrin Frink, Jr. as "Frink, Jr., Orrin". Rules 3 and 4 are seldom needed. In a bibliography of about 1,500 items, I found

fewer than 10 names that could not be typed as usual. Note that you can type John von Neumann as "John von Neumann" or "von Neumann, John". Because B IB TEX knows about von, it handles the name properly. There are a few rules concerning the title field.

Rule

Title

1. You should not put a period at the end of a title. The style supplies the appropriate punctuation.

2. Many styles, including the AMS styles, convert titles, except for the first letter of the title, to lowercase for all entry types. If you want a letter to appear in uppercase, put it—or the entire word—in braces. The same rule applies to the edition field. Some other styles only do this conversion for the titles of non-book-like entries.

3. To maximize the portability of your database, you should type titles with each im- portant word capitalized:

title = "On a Problem of {M. Stone}", The style used in this book, amsplain.bst, converts Problem to problem, so it

16.1 The database 427

makes no difference, but some styles do not. To be on the safe side, you should capitalize all words that may have to be capitalized.

For the record, here are the complete rules for titles: Capitalize (1) the first word; (2) the first word in a subtitle (B IB TEX assumes that a subtitle follows a colon, so it capitalizes the first word after a colon—a colon not introducing a subtitle should be typed in braces); (3) all other words except articles, unstressed conjunctions, and un- stressed prepositions. Words that should never be converted to lowercase, for example proper names such as Hilbert, should be enclosed in braces to prevent them from being converted to lowercase. In the example above, two letters in the title should not

be converted to lowercase, so we enclosed M. Stone in braces. We could also have typed {M. S}tone or {M.} {S}tone.

B IB TEX and the style automatically handle a number of things for you that you would have to handle yourself when typing text.

1. You do not have to mark periods in abbreviations, as .\ in the names of journals (see Section 5.2.2). So

journal = "Acta Math. Acad. Sci. Hungar.", typesets correctly.

2. You can type a single hyphen for a page range instead of the usual -- in the pages field (see Section 5.4.2). So

pages = "455-460", typesets correctly with an en dash.

3. You do not have to type nonbreakable spaces with ~ in the author or editor fields (see Section 5.4.3):

author = "George A. Menuhin", is correct. Normally you would type George~A. Menuhin.

Finally, we state a rule about accented characters.

Rule

Accents Put accented characters in braces: {\"{a}}.

This rule means that author = "Paul Erd\H{o}s",

428 Chapter 16 B IB TEX is not recommended. Instead, type

author = "Paul Erd{\H{o}}s", This rule is, again, about portability. Some styles, e.g., alpha and amsalpha,

create a citation for an article from the first three letters of the name and the last two digits of the year.

author = "Kurt G{\"{o}}del", year = 1931,

creates the citation: [G¨ od31]. The accent is used only if the accents rule has been followed.

The downside of this rule is that the braces suppress kerning.