BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Manually Format Citation

[SamBam77]

I am using Zotero to collect and organize all of my citations, which I then export in a bibtex format to use in my LaTeX document, using natbib to make my bibliography. The problem is that I have one or two 'odd' references that do not format correctly. I think this is due to a combination of Zotero not outputting correctly, and my bib style sheet not having the write guidelines for this format. In any case, it does not show the correct formatting (best case), or throws a bunch of errors when compiling (worst case).

Since I only have a couple of these instances, rather than tracking down the main problem(s) that cause it, I just wanted to manually format the citation myself. Is there a way to do this? I think I would just prefer to hard-code in the correct text, and then tell LaTeX to print that citation in the correct place (in the reference list at the end) when I reference that source. How can I do this?

[kaiserkarl13]

What sorts of errors are we talking about? Is it, for example, all entries of "inproceedings" are messed up but everything else is fine?

You can make a custom bibliography style (latex makebst) that may allow you to circumvent this problem, but my suspicion is that there is something specific about the entries in question that you can easily tweak. It might be something as simple as providing a missing field. Some database conversion programs even do things like choose the author's last name as the journal title or vice versa, which is a recipe for breaking things.

Posting a minimal working example will help with this matter.

[SamBam77]

I will show two examples of types of citations that are not showing correctly: a web page and a conference paper.

The output from Zotero when I write the .bib file is:

Code: Select all

@misc{last_google_????,
	title = {Google Home Page},
	url = {https://www.google.com/},
	journal = {Google},
	author = {last, first},
	howpublished = {https://www.google.com/}
},

@inproceedings{soumetz_drug_2004,
	title = {Drug delivery for nerve tissue regeneration},
	doi = {10.1109/NANO.2004.1392310},
	author = {Soumetz, F. C. and Giacomini, M. and Pastorino, L. and Phillips, J. B. and Brown, R. A. and Ruggiero, C.},
	month = aug,
	year = {2004},
	pages = {239--241}
}

You can see that the web page was outputted as a “misc” item, and the conference paper was writen as an “inproceedings” item.

I am using the standard file “achemso.bst” (from the American Chemical Society)
http://www.ccl.net/cca/text-processing/ ... .bst.shtml
to format my citations in Latex,
\bibliographystyle{achemso}
Inside this file there are no guidelines for how to format “misc” references, so compilation of my bibliography fails and I do not get anything if I want to cite a web page. There is a set of rules for formatting “inproceedings” references, but it is incorrect...at least as far as the ACS formatting standards go in their style guide (pg 37 of 55),
http://pubs.acs.org/userimages/ContentE ... pter14.pdf

My latex code is:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[english]{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[super, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}

\begin{document}

blah blah blah \cite{soumetz_drug_2004}

\bibliography{Refs}
\bibliographystyle{achemso}

\end{document}

If, however, I generate the citation directly from zotero (as opposed to exporting it to a bib file), it is generated correctly, since I have added the appropriate style guidelines for zotero.

Instead of just hard coding in the few problem references that I have, another solution would be to just fix the achemso style guideline file, I suppose. I could follow the pattern I see for other reference types and build my own, but this does not solve everything, since part of the problem is zotero is outputting the data in an incomplete way for the style sheet to use (for example, the name of the conference (for the conference paper example), or the date last accessed (for the web site example).

[kaiserkarl13]

That version of achemso.bst is out of date; the one I used first (my own copy, as distributed with achemso.cls) works without generating errors.

As for the formatting problems: I can't tell from your example whether "title" is the title of the article or the title of the actual proceedings. If it's the title of the book, then change "title" to "booktitle" and all should be well. If that's the article title, then you need a book title---conference proceedings always come in books. Your proceedings article is also missing the address of the publisher, the editors of the proceedings, and the publisher itself (which are optional fields, but required if you want it to look like the ACS's example).

When I added a booktitle field, BibTeX did a good job of getting the ACS style right. If you get no warnings from BibTeX and are still convinced it's not following ACS style, I suggest contacting the package maintainer, Joseph Wright---he's a regular poster to this forum and a very helpful person.