In conjunction with Bill Gasarch's call for including as many links as possible in the bibliographies of our papers (and for us to take some other more important steps towards open access; see also here) I've updated a BibTeX style file, abuser.bst, that I've been using in conjunction with pdflatex and the url package hyperref package in order to make hyperlinks in my papers' bibliographies.

Basically, you use this package very much like the standard BibTeX abbrv style, with the following changes:

  • For book series, such as LNCS, it is preferable to use number={nnnn} rather than volume={nnnn} to indicate the number of the book within the series; this frees the volume to indicate the volume of a multivolume work (which might exist within a differently numbered series). The formatting is also a little more compact; e.g. series={LNCS}, number={1234} produces "LNCS 1234" rather than "vol. 1234, other information, LNCS".

  • url={...} includes the given url within the formatted reference, as a hyperlink for TeX systems that support hyperlinking.

  • eprint={...} includes the arxiv paper with the given eprint number, as a hyperlink for TeX systems that support hyperlinking.

  • doi={...} includes the given doi, as a hyperlink for TeX systems that support hyperlinking. If you're not familiar with the doi system, it's a way to provide links to the publisher's web site for journal and conference papers that is supposedly more permanent than just using a url (as publishers often change their url schema but are not supposed to change their dois). So this doesn't do anything about the open access issue but does allow easy hyperlinking of online published content. The doi is usually included somewhere on the publisher's web page for an article but can also be looked up using crossref.org.

  • There's a note at the top of the file about Dutch names being sorted correctly (that is, "van Kreveld" should be sorted under "K"), but I no longer remember what I did to achieve this.

If you need something other than abbrv, you're on your own, but I hope this is helpful to at least a few other people than myself.




Comments:

None: url -> hyperref
2009-10-01T23:19:50Z
If you use hyperref.sty instead of url.sty, together with pdflatex, you get actual links in the PDF files (as well as properly formatted URLs).
11011110: Re: url -> hyperref
2009-10-01T23:23:49Z
I am getting actual links in the PDF files when I use this, so probably one of the other packages in my latex source is invoking hyperref somehow.
None: BST style files with doi+eprint
2009-10-01T23:44:23Z
There is also a simple script "urlbst" available that converts most standard bibliography style files to similar ones with eprint, doi and url links. http://nxg.me.uk/dist/urlbst/
11011110: Re: BST style files with doi+eprint
2009-10-01T23:45:54Z
Thanks! Should come in handy the next time I want this effect in a different style.
brooksmoses:
2009-10-03T04:59:33Z
Pretty sure that what one does to get names to be sorted correctly for the cases where normal alpha-on-lastname-field doesn't do it is putting a sortkey field in the BibTeX database; BibTeX alpha sorting uses that to sort by if it exists, and the lastname if it doesn't. I don't recall what the exact name of the field is, though.
None: Underscores in DOIs
2009-10-15T02:37:43Z
Thanks very much for this. Using abuser.bst, I'm getting a problem with DOIs that have underscores---the hyperlink goes to the right place, but LaTeX tries to treat this as a subscript in the displayed text.
11011110: Re: Underscores in DOIs
2009-10-15T02:54:33Z
For instance, DOIs to chapters in Springer's Lecture Notes in... series? You need to use \_ instead of _. Then they should both look right and link right.
None: Re: Underscores in DOIs
2009-10-15T03:22:30Z
Oh, of course. (I've been adding the backslashes by hand for the displayed versions of LNCS chapters, but didn't realize---or, foolishly, check---that these wouldn't break the links.) Thanks very much, and my apologies for missing the obvious.