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BibTeX @inproceedings: Conference Papers

Use @inproceedings for a paper published in conference or workshop proceedings. @conference is the same type under another name, and @proceedings describes the volume as a whole.

On this page
  1. When to use @inproceedings
  2. Examples
  3. Fields
  4. How it is typeset
  5. @conference
  6. @proceedings
  7. Common mistakes
  8. biblatex
  9. Related types

When to use @inproceedings

@inproceedings is for a single paper in the proceedings of a conference, symposium or workshop. If the paper appeared in a journal, even in a special issue on a conference, use @article. A chapter in an edited book that isn’t tied to a conference is an @incollection. A preprint that hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet belongs in @misc.

Examples

A minimal entry with only the required fields:

@inproceedings{dean2004mapreduce,
  author    = {Dean, Jeffrey and Ghemawat, Sanjay},
  title     = {{MapReduce}: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters},
  booktitle = {6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation ({OSDI} 04)},
  year      = {2004}
}

A complete entry:

@inproceedings{he2016deep,
  author    = {He, Kaiming and Zhang, Xiangyu and Ren, Shaoqing and Sun, Jian},
  title     = {Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the {IEEE} Conference on Computer Vision
               and Pattern Recognition ({CVPR})},
  pages     = {770--778},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  address   = {Las Vegas, NV, USA},
  month     = jun,
  year      = {2016},
  doi       = {10.1109/CVPR.2016.90}
}

If the paper has a DOI, the DOI → BibTeX converter generates the entry for you.

Fields

Field Required Meaning
author yes Authors of the paper, separated by and (see names)
title yes Title of the paper
booktitle yes Title of the proceedings
year yes Year of publication
editor no Editors of the proceedings
volume or number no Volume or number within a series
series no Series, e.g. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
pages no Page range, with a double dash: 770--778
address no Where the conference was held
month no Month of the conference or publication, e.g. jun
organization no Sponsoring organization
publisher no Publisher of the proceedings
note no Anything else, printed at the end

Since BibTeX 0.99, address in @inproceedings and @proceedings is the place of the conference, not the publisher’s city. If you want to give the publisher’s location, put it into the publisher field.

doi, url and isbn are not standard fields. plain, abbrv, alpha and unsrt ignore them; plainnat and other newer styles print them.

How it is typeset

The plain style prints the two examples as:

Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. MapReduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters. In 6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 04), 2004.

Kaiming He, Xiangyu Zhang, Shaoqing Ren, and Jian Sun. Deep residual learning for image recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages 770–778, Las Vegas, NV, USA, June 2016. IEEE.

The paper title is converted to sentence case. The booktitle is printed in italics exactly as you typed it. With an editor, a volume and a series, the middle part becomes “In Jane Roe, editor, Proceedings …, volume 12 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages …”.

@conference

@conference is identical to @inproceedings. It exists only for compatibility with Scribe, the system whose database format BibTeX borrowed. Both produce the same output in every standard style. Prefer @inproceedings, since more tools recognise it.

@proceedings

@proceedings describes the whole volume instead of one paper in it.

Fields
Required title, year
Optional editor, volume or number, series, address, month, organization, publisher, note 
@proceedings{osdi2004,
  title     = {6th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation ({OSDI} 04)},
  year      = {2004},
  publisher = {USENIX Association},
  address   = {San Francisco, CA, USA},
  month     = dec
}

@proceedings has no author. When there is no editor either, BibTeX sorts by organization. If that is missing too, as in the example above, it prints Warning--to sort, need editor, organization, or key and you should add a key field.

If you cite several papers from the same volume, each @inproceedings entry can inherit the shared fields from a @proceedings entry through crossref. See cross-references for the rules.

Common mistakes

  • journal instead of booktitle. @inproceedings ignores journal, and BibTeX warns about the empty booktitle.
  • The conference name in title. title is the paper, booktitle is the proceedings.
  • Lower-cased acronyms. In the paper title, protect them with braces: {MapReduce}, {GPU}. See protecting capital letters.
  • A single hyphen in pages. Write 770--778 to get an en dash.
  • The year twice. If the booktitle already contains the year, as in “Proceedings of the 2016 Conference …”, the bibliography still prints year at the end. That is expected; don’t drop the required field.
  • Publisher’s city in address. See the note under the field table.
  • Proceedings published in a book series. Volumes in series such as LNCS are still @inproceedings. Use series and volume for the series information.

biblatex

biblatex accepts @inproceedings unchanged and treats @conference as an alias. The main difference is the place: address is mapped to location, which biblatex reads as the publisher’s location and prints before the publisher (“Las Vegas, NV, USA: IEEE”). For the conference itself biblatex has the fields eventtitle, eventdate and venue. doi, url and isbn are printed by default.