BibTeX @book: How to Cite a Book

Use @book for a complete book with a publisher, whether it has authors or editors. To cite a single chapter, use @incollection or @inbook instead.

On this page

When to use @book
Minimal example
Complete example
Edited book
Fields
How plain typesets it
Common mistakes
Differences in biblatex
Related entry types

When to use @book

@book describes a whole book that names its publisher. That covers monographs, textbooks and edited volumes cited as a whole.

For a book chapter with its own author and title, use @incollection. For a chapter or page range of a book by one author, use @inbook.
For a bound work without a publisher, use @booklet. For a thesis, use @phdthesis or @mastersthesis. For conference proceedings as a whole, use @proceedings.

If you only want to point to a page or chapter of a book, you don’t need a separate entry. Cite the book and add the detail in the document: \cite[p.~42]{knuth1984texbook}.

Minimal example

The required fields are author or editor, title, publisher and year:

@book{knuth1984texbook,
  author    = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  title     = {The {\TeX}book},
  publisher = {Addison-Wesley},
  year      = {1984}
}

Complete example

A volume of a multi-volume work, with series, edition and place of publication:

@book{knuth1997fundamental,
  author    = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  title     = {Fundamental Algorithms},
  volume    = {1},
  series    = {The Art of Computer Programming},
  publisher = {Addison-Wesley},
  address   = {Reading, Massachusetts},
  edition   = {Third},
  year      = {1997},
  isbn      = {0-201-89683-4}
}

Edited book

A book without an author takes editor in place of author:

@book{miller1972complexity,
  editor    = {Miller, Raymond E. and Thatcher, James W. and Bohlinger, Jean D.},
  title     = {Complexity of Computer Computations},
  series    = {The IBM Research Symposia Series},
  publisher = {Plenum Press},
  address   = {New York},
  year      = {1972}
}

Fields

Field	Status	Meaning
`author` or `editor`	required	One of the two, not both. Names are separated by `and`. See names.
`title`	required	The title of the book.
`publisher`	required	The name of the publisher.
`year`	required	The year of publication.
`volume` or `number`	optional	The volume of a multi-volume work, or the number of the book in a series. Not both.
`series`	optional	The name of the series or of the multi-volume work.
`address`	optional	The publisher’s city.
`edition`	optional	The edition as a capitalised ordinal word: `Second`.
`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, @book also accepts key and crossref.

Non-standard fields. isbn, doi, url, pagetotal and language are not part of the standard. The standard styles (plain, unsrt, abbrv, alpha) ignore them without a warning. plainnat and its relatives print isbn, doi and url, and biblatex supports all of them.

How plain typesets it

With \bibliographystyle{plain}, the three examples are printed as

Donald E. Knuth. The TeXbook. Addison-Wesley, 1984.

Donald E. Knuth. Fundamental Algorithms, volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, third edition, 1997.

Raymond E. Miller, James W. Thatcher, and Jean D. Bohlinger, editors. Complexity of Computer Computations. The IBM Research Symposia Series. Plenum Press, New York, 1972.

Book titles are set in italics and keep the capitalisation you entered, unlike article titles. The edition is lowercased in the middle of a sentence and the word “edition” is added by the style.

Common mistakes

Edition as a number. Write edition = {Third}, not {3}, {3rd} or {Third Edition}. The standard styles append the word “edition” and print the value as it is, so those variants give “3 edition”, “3rd edition” and “third edition edition”. Leave the field out for a first edition.

Both author and editor. A @book takes one or the other. If both are present, BibTeX prints Warning--can't use both author and editor fields and drops the editor. A translator or the editor of a classic text can go into note.

Both volume and number. Use volume with series for a volume of a multi-volume work (“volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming”). Use number with series for a numbered book in a series (“Number 1281 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science”). With both fields, BibTeX warns and ignores number. A number without a series also produces a warning.

Organisation as author. Wrap an institutional author in a second pair of braces, author = {{American Mathematical Society}}, so that it is not split into first and last name.

Capitals in the title. plain leaves book titles alone, but other styles convert them to sentence case. Protect proper nouns and acronyms with braces anyway: {A Guide to {\LaTeX}}. See protecting capital letters.

Subtitle in a separate field. There is no subtitle field in the standard styles. Write it into title, after a colon.

Citing the wrong edition. Year, publisher and page numbers change between editions. Take the details from the copy you actually used.

Differences in biblatex

biblatex accepts the entries above unchanged. Its native field names are:

location for the place of publication; address is an alias.
date in place of year and month.
edition as a number, edition = {3}, which each language prints in its own form.
subtitle, isbn, doi, url, pagetotal and translator as regular fields.
author and editor may be given together.

biblatex also has @collection for an edited volume with contributions by different authors and @mvbook for a multi-volume work as a whole.

@incollection and @inbook for book chapters.
@proceedings for conference proceedings.
@phdthesis and @mastersthesis for theses.
@techreport for reports published by an institution.
All entry types