Return to Revisions

On the main site, the (nearly invisible) cite button found in the share menu gives an example citation and gives both bibtex and amsref misc entries that are easy to cut and paste.

Unfortunately, the mechanism to generate the bibtex entry has some bugs.

@MISC {22350,
TITLE = {What are some examples of colorful language in serious mathematics  papers?},
AUTHOR = {François G. Dorais (http://mathoverflow.net/users/2000/francois-g-dorais)},
HOWPUBLISHED = {MathOverflow},
NOTE = {URL:http://mathoverflow.net/q/22350 (version: 2010-04-23)},
EPRINT = {http://mathoverflow.net/q/22350},
URL = {http://mathoverflow.net/q/22350}
}

To get a proper entry from this:

• First decode any HTML encoded characters. For example, &#231 above should be replaced by ç, {\c c}, or equivalent. If you use special characters like ç, make sure to use the LaTeX package inputenc with the appropriate encoding (e.g. utf8) and to use bibtex8 since bibtex only supports the ASCII character set.

• Since bibtex tries to parse the author field and break it into parts (first, last, suffix, etc.), it is best to remove the parenthetical link to the user profile since that will often break the parsing mechanism. (An alternative is to only use the link to the user profile and delete the name, but that might lead to sorting issues.)

• If the bibtex style you use does recognize the eprint or url fields, the visibly redundant entries containing the url could result in the url being printed two or three times. Consequently, you may have to remove some of these entries to fit your preferred bibtex style.

• Since this is an answer rather than a question, consider editing the title to make this clearer. You may also consider changing the URL to http://mathoverflow.net/a/22350.

• If you use the hyperref package, you could also wrap it in a \url command in the note field so that it becomes clickable. Do not do this for the url field since styles that use this field will normally do the wrapping for you. A few styles support the urldate field which, combined with url, is perhaps a better alternative than the given note field.

• The use of the eprint field is extremely style dependent. Some styles will do something reasonable with the field given above but many more will not. Maybe there is an obscure style out there that understands eprint but not url. Unless you use that style, it's probably better to remove the eprint field.