General ⇒ Bibliography Item prevents Compilation

[tho_mi]

Hey,

about half an hour ago LaTeX began to give me the following error messages:

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! Missing number, treated as zero.<to be read again>i ...y_development_programmatic_eis_wind_????}

The strange thing is, in most cases there is a \citet in the concerned line. E.g. the line corresponding to the error message above is:

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So the energy has to be transported over long distances.\footnote{see \citet{wind_energy_development_programmatic_eis_wind_????}}

But sometimes the line LaTeX refers to has absolutely nothing to do with the error message. E.g.:

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! Missing = inserted for \ifnum.<to be read again>o Energy}}{}]{consumers_energy_ludington_????}
! Missing number, treated as zero.<to be read again>o Energy}}{}]{consumers_energy_ludington_????}

and the corresponding line is

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\usepackage{datetime}

The error messages occurred after replacing the "????" by numbers, so i reversed it, but the error message don't want to disappear. I always have to "clean up", then run bibtex and then latex, but then the bibliography is missing (and the references are just "?") and the table of figures is also empty. I suppose that the problem has something to do with BibTeX (i know, it seems a bit obvious), but i don't know what it exactly is. I am using natbib.

Thanks in advance!

[cgnieder]

Could you please try to create a minimal working example that let's us reproduce the error? Otherwise it will be hard to say anything helpful.

Regards

[tho_mi]

Are these two files enough/ok?

[cgnieder]

Indeed it is!

When I run that tex file with pdflatex and then bibtex I get a BiBTeX warning:

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Running `BibTeX' on `Advanced_Manufacturing' with ``bibtex Advanced_Manufacturing''
This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (TeX Live 2012)
The top-level auxiliary file: Advanced_Manufacturing.aux
The style file: chicago.bst
Database file #1: Advanced_Manufacturing.bib
Warning--empty year in wind_energy_development_programmatic_eis_wind_????
(There was 1 warning)

BibTeX finished at Sat Jun  8 22:00:38

Apparently the wind_energy_development_programmatic_eis_wind_???? entry is missing the year field which causes LaTeX to choke once the bibliography entry is inserted into the tex file. Usually the year field is a required field. After I added year = 2013 to the entry the error was gone.

Regards

[tho_mi]

Thanks a lot!