Bibtex

General

  • If you are new to bibtex, this is a good place to get started: http://www.bibtex.org
  • ALWAYS use the Calvin bibtex files (folder calvin/bibtex in the svn repository). Do NOT start your own bibtex file.
  • Check out folder bibtex at the same level as folder papers. Then, add \bibliography{../../bibtex/shortstrings,./../bibtex/calvin,../../bibtex/vggroup} into your main tex file (or longstring depending on what you need, see Sec. 3).
  • ALWAYS use the algorithm in Sec. 4 when you need to cite a paper
  • ALWAYS do an svn update before committing any changes to calvin.bib
  • If you get conflicts when you do svn update, choose the option postpone. Then solve the conflicts by hand using extra care. Updating and committing very frequently is the best way too reduce conflicts
  • NEVER modify file vgggroup.bib.
  • Cite using the ~ sign. For example: Ferrari et al.~\cite{ferrari10ijcv}. The ~ sign makes sure the citation is not moved to the next line.

Conventions

A Bibtex entry contains an entry type, a citation key, and a list of name-value fields:

bibtexformat

Entry type

This depends on what you are citing:

Conference paper → @inproceedings

Journal article → @article

Source code → @misc

You will mostly use these three, but occasionally you will come across:

Book → @book

Book chapter → @bookchapter

Book chapter where each chapter has different authors → @incollection

Citation key
  • It has to be in the form <lastnameFirstAuthor><shortYear><venueName>, for example girshick14cvpr.
  • Do not capitalize
  • Use two digits for the year
  • Do not use special characters (e.g. -,\,: )
  • As venueName, use the acronym of the venue (e.g. cvpr, ijcv).
  • If the first author has several papers at the same venue, append a keyword to distinguish them. For example, ferrari12cvpr-segmentation and ferrari12cvpr-mrf. Only in this case you are allowed to use a special character.
  • If it is not a conference or a journal, instead of venueName use a meaningful keyword. For example, the citation key for the Caffe source package is jia13caffe.
Fields common to all entries

The fields in this section are mandatory for any type of citation. Fields that are mandatory for specific citation types are in the following sections.

Title. Make sure it matches the title of the paper/journal exactly. For source code, use the name of the package, usually available on the website.

Author. Use format: <LastnameFirstAuthor>, <MiddleInitial>. <FirstNameInitial>. and <LastnameSecondAuthor>, <MiddleInitial>. <FirstNameInitial>, …..  For example: Van de Sande, K.E.A. and Uijlings, J.R.R. and Gevers, T. and Smeulders, A.W.M.

Year. The year of the publication. Use four digits (e.g. 1994, 2003).

Fields specific to conference papers

Booktitle. The conference name. This has to be one of the macros in shortstrings and longstrings  (e.g. cvpr, iccv, eccv, nips).

Fields specific to journal articles

Journal. The journal name. This has to be one of the macros in shortstrings and longstrings (e.g. ijcv, pami).

Volume, number and pages. The names of these fields are self-explanatory. For pages, use {startpage-endpage}, for example {91-110}.

Fields specific to source code

Howpublished. The address of the website you downloaded it from. Use package \url for this.

Fields specific to books and book chapters

As a general rule, these types require the field publisher. For a book chapter, use field title for the title of the chapter, and booktitle for the title of the book. In the case of a book where each chapter has different authors, use field author for the authors of the chapter, and editor for the authors of the book. For more details on these rarer cases, please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX

Files shortstrings.bib and longstrings.bib
  • Use the macros in these files every time you have to enter the field booktitle for a conference paper (or journal for a journal article). This avoids citing the same venue with different names (e.g., CVPR, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Proceedings on the Conference of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, etc.).
  • Use either shortstrings.bib or lonstrings.bib The macros in the former map to acronyms (CVPR, IJCV, PAMI), in the latter to the full venue names.
  • Decide which one to use depending on where you are submitting. For CVPR use shortstrings.bib. For journals, we typically use longstrings.
  • If there is no macro for the venue of the entry that you are adding to calvin.bib, define it in BOTH shortstrings.bib and longstrings.big.
  • Use the entries already in the files as a guideline on the format. Note that the macros for a conference series (e.g. iccv8, iccv9, etc) map to the same value in shortstrings.bib, but each is different in longstrings.bib

 

 Algorithm for citing a paper

  • check if there is already an entry in the bibtex. Search for the title in calvin.bib and vggroup.bib.
  • Ii yes, use it and you are done! if not, add it at the end of calvin.bib.
  • check whether the citation key you just added is already used (remember this happens when one author has more papers at the same venue). If so, append a keyword to the citation key (for both entries).
  • To make things faster, you can google the bibtex entry and use it as a starting point, but then modify it to comply with the conventions of calvin.bib. Beware: many bibtex entries in google are incorrect (and in many different ways). It is your responsibility to make sure what you enter in calvin.bob is correct.
  • if the conference/journal for the entry is not in shortstrings and longstrings, add it there
  • If you find duplicate entries in the bibtex, remove the most recent one (i.e. the one closer to the end of the file). This will break other papers in the repository, and force the authors to fix them. It is nasty, but the only way we can think of to enforce consistency. Keeping duplicates around will only cause more mistakes in the future.
  • if you find some error in an existing entry, simply fix it (e.g. wrongly spelled author names, wrong title, wrong year).
  • in rare cases, you will find an entry matching the paper you wanted to cite in vggroup.bib but it has some error. DO NOT MODIFY VGGROUP. Instead, make a new entry in calvin.bib which has the corrected version of the entry. Use a different citation key than the one already in vggroup (this will come natural when following the calvin conventions for keys anyway).

Working with external authors

If you are collaborating with external authors (i.e. not from Calvin), you are responsible for fixing the entries that they add to the .bib file. The steps to give them permissions to work on the Calvin bibtex (or any Calvin svn folder) are:

  1. ask the external author to sign up to EASE friends:     https://www.ease.ed.ac.uk/friend/
  2. ask them to sign up to the ECDF subversion service: https://registration.ecdf.ed.ac.uk/svnreg/userreg.php
  3. tell Davide what e-mail address they used to sign up to ECDF.
  4. tell Davide what folder you want to share  (e.g.,https://svn.ecdf.ed.ac.uk/repo/inf/calvin/bibtex/)


Step 1 can be skipped if the author is external to Calvin, but internal to the UoE.