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BibTeX @article: Journal Articles

Use @article for a paper published in a journal, magazine or newspaper. It is the most common entry type in most .bib files.

On this page
  1. When to use @article
  2. Minimal example
  3. Complete example
  4. Fields
  5. How plain typesets it
  6. Common mistakes
  7. Differences in biblatex
  8. Related entry types

When to use @article

@article is for anything that appeared in a periodical: a research paper in a journal, a magazine article, a newspaper piece. It is not for conference papers, even when the proceedings look like a journal issue; those are @inproceedings. A chapter in an edited book is @incollection, and a preprint that has not appeared in a journal is best entered as @misc.

Minimal example

The four required fields are author, title, journal and year:

@article{turing1950computing,
  author  = {Turing, Alan M.},
  title   = {Computing Machinery and Intelligence},
  journal = {Mind},
  year    = {1950}
}

Complete example

A reader needs the volume and the pages to find the article, so a real entry should have them:

@article{ritchie1974unix,
  author  = {Ritchie, Dennis M. and Thompson, Ken},
  title   = {The {UNIX} Time-Sharing System},
  journal = {Communications of the ACM},
  year    = {1974},
  volume  = {17},
  number  = {7},
  pages   = {365--375},
  month   = jul,
  doi     = {10.1145/361011.361061}
}

If the article has a DOI, the DOI → BibTeX converter builds this entry for you.

Fields

Field Status Meaning
author required The authors, separated by and. See names.
title required The title of the article.
journal required The name of the journal.
year required The year of publication.
volume optional The volume of the journal.
number optional The issue within the volume.
pages optional A page number or a range such as 365--375.
month optional The month of publication, as jan … dec without braces.
note optional Additional text, printed at the end of the reference.

Like every entry type, @article also accepts key and crossref.

Non-standard fields. doi, url, issn, eprint and abstract are not part of the standard. The standard styles (plain, unsrt, abbrv, alpha) ignore them without a warning, so it does no harm to keep them. Styles such as plainnat print doi and url, and so do the standard biblatex styles.

How plain typesets it

With \bibliographystyle{plain}, the complete example above is printed as

Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson. The UNIX time-sharing system. Communications of the ACM, 17(7):365–375, July 1974.

The title has been converted to sentence case, the journal name is in italics, and volume, issue and pages are combined into 17(7):365–375. The minimal example gives

Alan M. Turing. Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 1950.

Without a volume, the page numbers are introduced by a word: Mind, pages 433–460, 1950.

Common mistakes

Authors separated by commas. Names are always separated by the word and, however many there are: {Ritchie, Dennis M. and Thompson, Ken}. A comma belongs inside a single name, between last and first name.

Capital letters lost in the title. Most styles convert article titles to sentence case. Without the braces in {UNIX}, plain prints “The unix time-sharing system”. Put braces around acronyms and proper nouns, not around the whole title. See protecting capital letters.

Mixing up volume and number. volume is the number of the year’s run (17), number is the issue within it (7). An entry with a number but no volume triggers Warning--there's a number but no volume. If a journal counts issues only, put that count in volume.

Page ranges. Write ranges with two hyphens, 365--375, which LaTeX turns into an en dash. The standard styles repair a single hyphen, but not every style does. For an article with an article number instead of pages, put that number in pages.

Month in braces. month = jul uses a predefined abbreviation, so each style can print the month in its own form: jan becomes “January” in plain and “Jan.” in abbrv. A value in braces is printed literally, so month = {jul} appears as “jul”.

Abbreviated journal names. Enter the journal name the way the target style wants it. {Communications of the ACM} and {Commun. ACM} are both common; a single file should use one of them consistently. The standard styles predefine a few computer science journals as abbreviations: journal = cacm gives “Communications of the ACM” in plain and “Commun. ACM” in abbrv.

Accents and special characters. In classic BibTeX, write {\"o} rather than ö. See special symbols.

Differences in biblatex

biblatex reads the entry above unchanged. Its own field names differ slightly:

  • journaltitle is the native name; journal is accepted as an alias.
  • date = {1974-07} replaces year and month, which still work.
  • number is the issue number, and issue is meant for non-numeric issues such as Spring.
  • doi, url and eprint are standard fields and are printed.

Related entry types