Request for improvements to the citation bibtex format

Question

According to my bibtex files, I have made citations in my various published articles to 71 different posts on MathOverflow, both questions and answers, often multiple times in different articles, when the topic recurs in follow-up articles, such as in the emerging literature on infinite chess. I cite MathOverflow whenever it is relevant, and this has been the case in numerous circumstances.

I am truly thankful that it is easy and convenient to cite MathOverflow questions and answers. One need only click the "cite" button to get usable bibtex code for that post.

However, the default bibtex code that is provided can be improved in several respects. The current format seems to be a hodgepodge of sorts implementing various compromises, but I think we can design a more robust default bibtex format.

Let me explain what I would like to see. Currently, for example, if I click on "cite" on my post answering Extensions of PA+$\neg$Con(PA) with large consistency strength, what I get is:

@MISC {457828,
    TITLE = {Extensions of $PA+\neg Con(PA)$ with large consistency strength},
    AUTHOR = {Joel David Hamkins (https://mathoverflow.net/users/1946/joel-david-hamkins)},
    HOWPUBLISHED = {MathOverflow},
    NOTE = {URL:https://mathoverflow.net/q/457828 (version: 2023-11-06)},
    EPRINT = {https://mathoverflow.net/q/457828},
    URL = {https://mathoverflow.net/q/457828}
}

What I would like to get is something more like this:

@MISC {MO457828,
    TITLE = {Extensions of $PA+\neg Con(PA)$ with large consistency strength},
    AUTHOR = {Joel David Hamkins},
    authorid = {1946},
    authorurl = {https://mathoverflow.net/users/1946/joel-david-hamkins},
    HOWPUBLISHED = {MathOverflow answer},
    year = {2023},
    keywords = {lo.logic},
    URL = {https://mathoverflow.net/q/457828},
    urldate = {2023-11-06}
}

[Note: I updated the date format to YYYY-MM-DD per Willie's answer.]

To explain the requested features:

• The year field should be set to the year of the post. This is an important basic bibtex field, which should definitely be set, but is not set in the default behavior.
• The howpublished field should differentiate between "MathOverflow question" and "MathOverflow answer". This is an important distinction that I always observe in my own citations, and I think it should become standard.
• The bibentry id can be improved by prefacing MO to the id number. This would follow MR practice. I expect that most people will make further edits to the id to follow their own personal naming practice.
• The keywords fields can be set to a comma-separated list of the tags on the main post. This field is used currently by many bibtex styles, as well as by various web apps, mainly for the purpose of sorting bibliographies by topic.
• The url should be in the url field only. Why are we setting the url in three different fields? When I use the bib data as-is, the url shows up three times in my bibliography. This weird handling of the url seems to have arisen as a compromise trying to accommodate various outdated bibtex usage practices (some predating the common use of urls), but is incompatible with current best practice. I think we should instead settle upon a robust sensible bibtex format, which will work going forward with current and new bibtex formats that people might design. Specifically, for the treatment of urls, I believe the most sensible format will be to use the url and the urldate fields.
• the urldate should be set to the date of the post (or the date of access?). This is exactly what this field is for.
• The author field should be used for the author name only, that is, the username. The other author information such as the id number and the url can be placed into other sensible author fields as I indicate. This will allow for easy edits of the bibtex entry, if someone should want to place that information into the author field, such as in the case of an anonymous author, but will also work well for what in my experience has been the main use case, where one is citing an author by their actual name. The authorurl field will enable bibstyles easily to set the author name itself as a hyperlink.

Question. What other requested behavior of the cite function might there be?

Answer 1

Aside from these cosmetic issues, there are actual serious problems with the BibTeX citation button that are actual bugs: it mangles author names (and post titles, I presume, though I haven’t tested it), creating invalid TeX input. For example, I just tried it on one of my own posts, and got

AUTHOR = {Emil Jeřábek (https://mathoverflow.net/users/12705/emil-je%c5%99%c3%a1bek)},

instead of the needed

AUTHOR = {Emil Je{\v{r}}{\'{a}}bek ...

(This is much worse than I expected. I mean, I can see that converting Unicode characters to TeX input is hard, and would understand if the button just spit out the name literally as Jeřábek, leaving the conversion to the user. But the way it replaced one of the two letters with diacritics with an HTML entity (!) is utterly bizarre.)

Answer 2

On a technical front

urldate formatting

urldate should not be formatted the way Joel suggests

For compatibility with biblatex, date fields must be formatted in YYYY-MM-DD format. (See, e.g. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/429322/119)

author field formatting

Similarly, the current output of the author field is far from ideal. Regardless of what you think belong in that field, the data as currently presented breaks every attempt to sort/alphabetize authors correctly (in large part due to the parenthetical url).

As online names are not necessary real names, nor do they conform to standard western first/last name preferences, I would request that no matter what data is placed in the field, please at least make it so that the author field includes an extra pair of braces. So it presents as

 author = {{Joel David Hamkins (https://mathoverflow.net/users/1946/joel-david-hamkins)}},

instead. This way at least the sorting will be correct for pseudonymous users, and for users using their real names, one can easily edit the generated bibtex entry to read

author = {{Hamkins, Joel David (https://mathoverflow.net/users/1946/joel-david-hamkins)}},

to sort under H.

bibtex fields

There are two comments that I think should be called out: 1 and 2. BibTeX and BibLaTeX by design do not place any limits to what fields can be used in the .bib file. The system is extremely extensible in that one can create one's own bibliography style to include any field one wants. (See, e.g., how to do it for bibtex; biblatex is considerably easier.) Fields that are unused by the bibliography styles are silently ignored.

Proposing a way to generate bibtex entry, especially when it comes to "new fields" that are ignored by, say, plain.bst, is therefore incomplete without specifying what the intended bibtex/biblatex styles it is targeting.
This is exacerbated by the fact that while there is general agreement for printed matter what are the useful fields to include, for online matter there are rather divergent implementations between various commonly used bibtex styles and biblatex configurations. The current output is a sort of common denominator / compromise between the various styles. Unfortunately, I am quite pessimistic (especially since we are mathematicians) on the prospect of this community settling on one single bibtex style to use.

Defining a new document type?

One option is to explore is to maybe embrace biblatex; this makes it relatively easy to define new document types. (This would repace @misc with something like @mathoverflow or @stackexchange.) This would also allow us to design the data fields from scratch. With some community effort we can even publish a CTAN package specifically to enable the new data type when used with biblatex.

Answer 3

I disagree with some of your requests.

It's true, that you and me and many others on the site, are using our real names (or at least the names that appear on our publications). Others do not. If I am citing a post given by "PseudoNeo", having just that name as the author is not reasonable and I wouldn't be surprised to find an editor who would complain about that sort of citation appearing in the bibliography (on the other hand, footnotes get a much broader pass). You say that in the case of an anonymous author this can be a reasonable thing after all, but how should the software recognise when a name is reasonable or not?

Secondly, the name of the reference is something that every person has their own convention. If MathSciNet exports in a way that doesn't match your convention, and I'm assuming that you're using that so much more than you're using the cite button on MathOverflow, then I don't see why MathOveflow should conform to one user's style or another. Having the post ID there is fine, with perhaps the change be "MO" or something.

Having said that, please remember that the cite feature is something that exists on multiple websites across the network, so making changes is something that while possible, will need to be in a modular enough way so that it doesn't change citations on Physics.SE or CS.SE or Math.SE to look like they came out of MathOverflow.

Finally, arXiv exports the eprint field, and presumably that one is used at least as much as the MathOverflow cite feature. And not everyone use biblatex either.

So, while we can probably take some of your requests and make them happen, and I agree that adding question/answer to the citation is a good distinction, I think that making edits for something to match your own personal style is something that we all quite literally need to contend with, and that's okay.