BibTeX entry type: book
Example of a BibTeX book entry
``` @book{hawking1988, title = "A Brief History of Time: From the {B}ig {B}ang to Black Holes", author = "Hawking, Stephen", year = 1988, publisher = "Bantam", address = "London" } ```
When to use the entry type book?
The book entry type is used to properly reference a book in BibTeX. You can use @book for any complete published work with a clearly defined publisher. In most cases, it is enough to provide the author, title, year, publisher, and address fields for BibTeX to generate a correct citation.
Complete list of fields for a BibTeX article entry
Below we provide a list of required and optional fields for the book type. There are also some non-standard fields that are only supported by some citation styles.
| Field name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
author | Required | The person or persons who wrote the book. |
editor | Required | The person or persons who edited the book. |
title | Required | The name of the book. |
publisher | Required | The publisher of the book. |
year | Required | The year the book was published. |
volume | Optional | The volume of the work in the series. |
number | Optional | The number of the volume within the series. |
pages | Optional | The page number or page range the article is found on. |
month | Optional | The month the article was published. |
note | Optional | Any miscellaneous information that does not qualify for another field. |
doi | Non-standard | The digital object identifier - a unique way in which the book is found. |
issn | Non-standard | For an article, the international standard serial number is a unique identifier determined by the publisher of the article. |
isbn | Non-standard | The international standard book number - a unique identifier determined by the International ISBN Agency. |
How to cite a chapter of a book?
Sometimes only a section of a book, such as a chapter, is used. If only a part of a book is used then a proper reference is typically accomplished using the inbook entry type. This is considered the recommended method.
How to cite an electronic book (e-book)?
In this technologically evolving world we live in today, electronic versions of books (or e-books) are becoming ever the more commonplace. To cite a book you have read online, it is possible to include the url within the note’s field. In order for this to work, however, it is necessary to include the \usepackage{url} command within the your LaTeX file. See example:
@book{Hawking1988, title = "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes", author = "Hawking, Stephen", year = 1988, publisher = "Bantam", note = {\url{http://example.com/history_of_time.pdf}(visited 2016-01-01)} }
The more commonplace method is to use the non-standard field “url”. It’s note supported by all BibTeX styles, but for those that do it is the best solution. To verify if a style supports the “url” field, click here.
@book{Hawking1988, title = "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes", author = "Hawking, Stephen", year = 1988, publisher = "Bantam", url = "http://example.com/history_of_time.pdf" }