APA, Websites, BibTeX

tgrossen

I have been searching Google and StackExchange for hours but cannot find a clear and simple solution to a problem which a lot of people should be struggling with.

My settings/installed software:

Zotero 4.0.8 on Firefox with default output format set to American Psychological Association with a style last updated 2013-07-17.

Now I have a website citation (item type: web page) which, when exported to HTML, gives a beautiful:


Schroeder, S. (2012, October 4). Facebook Hits One Billion Active Users. Mashable. Retrieved July 17, 2013, from http://mashable.com/2012/10/04/facebook-one-billion/

Exactly the way it should be in LaTeX as well. Now, when exporting to BibTeX, I get:

@misc{schroeder_facebook_2012,
title = {Facebook Hits One Billion Active Users},
url = {http://mashable.com/2012/10/04/facebook-one-billion/},
abstract = {Facebook just officially reached one billion active users, Facebook {CEO} and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.},
urldate = {2013-07-17},
journal = {Mashable},
author = {Schroeder, Stan},
month = oct,
year = {2012}
},

Now, how the heck do I bring BibTeX, LaTeX do correctly format this @misc entry like the HTML export above?

Using \usepackage{natbib} and \bibliographystyle{apalike} the only thing I get from this is:

Schroeder, S. (2012). Facebook hits one billion active users.

adamsmith

you could try using the (unofficial but pretty well supported) biblatex export translator:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15784/biblatex-export-translator/#Item_33

The problem with this in general is the lack of bibtex standards: There is no item type for webpages in plain bibtex, which is why Zotero goes with @misc. The biblatex translator goes with @online, which should work better (but isn't recognized in many regular bibtex applications.

Also, to avoid misunderstandings, Zotero's bibtex export isn't affected by the default output format. There's only one bibtex export format. We'll likely add biblatex in the future, but there's no way Zotero will ever support package-specific bibtex output.

(not sure where the day - i.e. the 4th - went in the bibtex export, though. That shouldn't get lost).

tgrossen

I really don't want to go into BibLaTeX... I am just wondering whether there is a LaTeX bibliographystyle which correctly parses @misc.. if needed I even manually change @misc to something else.

adamsmith

this is probably not the best place to get an answer then - you didn't get anything on http://tex.stackexchange.com/ ? That'd be a much better place for bibtex questions. We really only have one guy here who really knows TeX and he only comes around so often.

jroberts2

Though I stopped using bibtex in favour of biblatex years ago, here's my bit of advice:

The bibtex data zotero exports will not work out of the box with the standard bibtex styles, i.e. abbrv.bst, alpha.bst, plain.bst, and unsrt.bst.

Using @misc for online entries is indeed the least bad option here, but it accepts only the fields author, title, howpublished, month, year, note.

Thus, using howpublished = {\url{http://foo.bar}} would be the way to go. \usepackage{url} will have to be included in your LaTeX document, of course.

Next, neither urldate nor the YYYY-MM-DD syntax are supported by standard bibtex.

Finally, the day is dropped because the official bibtex data model includes only year and month. (Still, the bibtex manual, ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/contrib/doc/btxdoc.pdf, indicates a somewhat awkward solution for including a day:

month = jul # "~4,"

All this said, try biblatex, you won't regret it.

Or, to quote http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/base: "... it is best to avoid BibTeX in favour of biblatex, if at all possible."

tgrossen

Alright, it took me hours to move to biblatex (biblatex and biber version compatibility etc etc), but now I am using it in combination with the (unofficial) biblatex translator. I actually added a comment there which some of you might be able to answer.

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/15784/biblatex-export-translator/#Item_41