Citing and Referencing

Citing and Referencing#

We maintain a centralised BibTeX file containing all references. The file is located within this repository in the file ./book/website/_bibliography/references.bib.

BibTeX file basics#

BibTeX files are a way to format lists of references in a structured way. Basic elements of an entry include a reference type, a unique citation key, and a series of key-value pairs that describe the reference (for example, author or title).

There are a number of keywords for different references types in BibTeX. Luckily, there are tools to help format references into BibTeX syntax. If you know the DOI for your reference, you can use doi2bib to help populate a good enough BibTeX entry. For example, here is a good enough BibTeX entry for The Turing Way handbook itself. Another good tool is Google Scholar, where you search for a reference, click on the large double quotes " or activate the pop-up menu labeled “Cite,” and then click on “BibTeX” near the bottom.

Examples of listing a BibTeX-formatted reference are shown below.

Adding a new reference in references.bib#

You can edit reference file locally using a method from the following:

We use a standard BibTeX format to add a new entry. For example, there is an entry in the references.bib file as:

@article{baker2016reproducibility,
    author={Baker, Monya},
  	title={Reproducibility crisis?},
  	journal={Nature},
  	volume={533},
  	number={26},
  	pages={353--66},
  	year={2016}
}

Finish editing by adding a new entry at the end of the file.

Citation key style-guide#

We recommend using the following structure for citation keys:

AuthorYYYYword

Where:

  1. Author is the surname of the first author (Baker above)

  2. YYYY is the year (2016 above)

  3. word is the first meaningful word in the title (reproducibility above). Note, this is subjective―choose a name that makes it easy to remember the reference when you see the citation key.

Adding a new reference in the text#

To include a citation in your content, we follow the recommendation by Jupyter Book that uses sphinxcontrib-bibtex extension.

The key concepts are:

  • Include a reference using using:

{cite:ps}`CITEKEY`

Here CITEKEY is the corresponding citation key in references.bib.

  • You can also include multiple citations in one go by separating the CITEKEYs by a comma:

{cite:ps}`CITEKEY1,CITEKEY2,CITEKEY3`

We will cite the article that we edited earlier in the reference.bib file using:

{cite:ps}`baker2016reproducibility`

This will appear in your chapter as [Bak16].

The complete bibliography entry is available at the end of this book (see resources) using the directives:

```{bibliography} ../_bibliography/references.bib

```

For the advanced usage, see the documentation by sphinxcontrib-bibtex, which is a Sphinx extension for BibTeX style citations.

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