Frequently Asked Question List for TeX
There is no citation type for URLs, per se, in the standard BibTeX styles, though Oren Patashnik (the author of BibTeX) is believed to be considering developing one such for use with the long-awaited BibTeX version 1.0.
The actual information that need be available in a citation of an URL is discussed at some length in the publicly available on-line extracts of ISO 690–2; the techniques below do not satisfy all the requirements of ISO 690–2, but they offer a solution that is at least available to users of today’s tools.
Until the new version of BibTeX arrives, the simplest technique is
to use the howpublished
field of the standard styles’ @misc
function. Of course, the strictures
about typesetting URLs still apply, so the
entry will look like:
@misc{...,
...,
howpublished = "\url{http://...}"
}
A possible alternative approach is to use BibTeX styles other than the standard ones, that already have URL entry types. Candidates are:
natbib
styles (plainnat
,
unsrtnat
and abbrvnat
), which are extensions of
the standard styles, principally for use with natbib
itself. However, they’ve acquired URLs and other “modern”
entries along the way. The same author’s custom-bib
is
also capable of generating styles that honour URL entries.babelbib
bundle, which offers
multilingual bibliographies, similarly provides a
set of standard-style equivalents that have URL entries.harvard
package (if the
citation styles are otherwise satisfactory for you).
Harvard
bibliography styles all include a url
field in their specification; however, the typesetting offered is
somewhat feeble (though it does recognise and use
LaTeX2HTML
macros if they are available, to create
hyperlinks).You can also acquire new BibTeX styles by use of Norman Gray’s
urlbst
system, which is based on a Perl
script
that edits an existing BibTeX style file to produce a new
style. The new style thus generated has a webpage
entry type, and
also offers support for url
and lastchecked
fields
in the other entry types. The Perl
script comes with a set
of converted versions of the standard bibliography styles.
Another possibility is that some conventionally-published paper, technical report (or even book) is also available on the Web. In such cases, a useful technique is something like:
@techreport{...,
...,
note = "Also available as \url{http://...}"
}
There is good reason to use the url
or hyperref
packages in this context: BibTeX has a habit of splitting
lines it considers excessively long, and if there are no space
characters for it to use as “natural” breakpoints, BibTeX will
insert a comment (%
) character … which
is an acceptable character in an URL. Any current version of
either of the url
or hyperref
packages detects this
“%
–end-of-line” structure in its argument, and
removes it.
FAQ ID: Q-citeURL