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BibTeX Entry Types: Complete Reference

The entry type is the word after the @ in a .bib file. It tells the bibliography style which fields to expect and how to format the reference. This page helps you pick the right one.

On this page
  1. Which entry type should I use?
  2. The 14 standard entry types
  3. How BibTeX uses the entry type
  4. Non-standard types: @online, @software, @dataset

Which entry type should I use?

Find what you are citing in the left column. The detail pages have copyable examples and the full list of fields.

What you are citing Use
A paper in a journal or magazine @article
A whole book @book
A chapter with its own author and title in an edited book @incollection
A chapter or page range of a book by a single author @inbook
A paper in conference proceedings @inproceedings
A PhD thesis or master’s thesis @phdthesis, @mastersthesis
A technical report, working paper or white paper @techreport
A website or web page @misc
A preprint, software, a dataset, a standard, a patent @misc
A software manual or other documentation @manual
A manuscript or lecture notes that were never published @unpublished

If you have a DOI or an arXiv ID, the DOI → BibTeX converter produces the entry with the right type for you.

The 14 standard entry types

These are the types defined in Oren Patashnik’s BibTeXing and implemented by the standard styles plain, unsrt, abbrv and alpha. Nearly every other bibliography style supports them as well.

Entry type Use for Details
@article An article in a journal or magazine. @article
@book A book with an explicit publisher. @book
@booklet A printed and bound work without a named publisher or sponsoring institution.
@conference The same as @inproceedings, kept for compatibility with Scribe. @inproceedings
@inbook A part of a book: a chapter, a section or a range of pages. @inbook
@incollection A part of a book that has its own title, typically a chapter in an edited volume. @incollection
@inproceedings An article in conference proceedings. @inproceedings
@manual Technical documentation.
@mastersthesis A master’s thesis. Theses
@misc Anything that fits no other type. @misc
@phdthesis A PhD thesis. Theses
@proceedings The proceedings of a conference as a whole. @inproceedings
@techreport A report published by a school or other institution, usually numbered within a series. @techreport
@unpublished A document with an author and a title that was not formally published.

The required and optional fields of every type are listed in one table in the format reference.

How BibTeX uses the entry type

An entry starts with the type, followed by the citation key and the fields:

@book{knuth1984texbook,
  author    = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  title     = {The {\TeX}book},
  publisher = {Addison-Wesley},
  year      = {1984}
}
  • The type is not case-sensitive. @Book, @BOOK and @book are the same.
  • Each type has required fields. If one is missing, BibTeX prints a warning such as Warning--empty publisher in knuth1984texbook and typesets the reference without it. The entry still appears in the bibliography.
  • Each type has optional fields that are printed when present. All other fields are ignored without a warning.
  • The type decides the layout. In plain, for example, the title of a @book is set in italics and keeps its capitalisation, while the title of an @article is set upright and converted to sentence case.

Picking a type that doesn’t match the source usually still gives a usable reference, but pieces go missing: a @book has no journal field, and an @article ignores publisher.

Non-standard types: @online, @software, @dataset

Types such as @online, @software, @dataset, @thesis, @report and @patent come from biblatex. They are not part of classic BibTeX. Many reference managers and publisher websites export them anyway.

When a standard style meets a type it doesn’t know, BibTeX reports

Warning--entry type for "key" isn't style-file defined

and formats the entry like @misc. Fields that @misc doesn’t use, such as url, are dropped. You have two options:

  • Staying with BibTeX: change the type to @misc and put the address in howpublished, as shown for websites and other sources. Some styles define extra types of their own. IEEEtran, for instance, has @electronic, @patent and @standard.
  • Switching to biblatex: it supports these types directly, along with fields like url, urldate and doi. See BibTeX or biblatex?