Adding references

Adding references#

Adding a citation to a lecture#

QuantEcon supports multiple citation styles to accommodate different writing contexts.

Standard citations#

To add a reference to the text of a QuantEcon lecture you can use the cite role:

{cite}`<bibtex-label>`

For example

* {cite}`StokeyLucas1989`, chapter 2

is rendered in HTML and LaTeX as:

[Stokey et al., 1989], chapter 2

In-text citations#

For citations that are part of a sentence, use the cite:t role:

{cite:t}`<bibtex-label>`

For example

This QuantEcon lecture describes randomized response surveys in the tradition of {cite:t}`Warner1965` that are designed to protect respondents' privacy.

is rendered in HTML and LaTeX as:

This QuantEcon lecture describes randomized response surveys in the tradition of Warner [1965] that are designed to protect respondents' privacy.

When to use each style#

  • Use {cite} for standard academic citations, typically at the end of sentences or in lists

  • Use {cite:t} when the author name(s) are part of the sentence flow and you want them to appear as regular text

Adding a new reference to QuantEcon#

To add a new reference to the project, a bibtex entry needs to be added to <repo>/lectures/_static/quant-econ.bib.

Writing a bibliography entry#

Guiding principles

An entry records a work the way its publisher records it. Start from the DOI, keep only the fields a reader sees, and protect the capitals that must survive.

The file is read by two tools: sphinxcontrib-bibtex (through pybtex) for Jupyter Book 1 today, and citation-js for mystmd. These rules keep an entry correct in both, and the same in every lecture series that holds it.

Getting an entry#

Start from the work’s DOI. The DOI resolver returns a BibTeX entry built from the publisher’s record:

curl -LH "Accept: application/x-bibtex" https://doi.org/10.2307/1913601

The result still needs tidying to the rules below. For this DOI it invents a key (Hansen_1987), names JSTOR as the publisher, adds ISSN, url and month, and gives only the first page.

Do not paste an export from Google Scholar or JSTOR unedited. They lower-case journal names (“Journal of political economy”), add subtitles (“Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society”) and abbreviate.

Rules#

  1. The publisher’s record decides the facts: authors, year, volume, number and pages. Cite the published version of a paper, and cite a working paper only if it was never published.

  2. Use the entry type that fits the work, with the fields it needs: @article with a journal; @book with a publisher; @incollection with a booktitle and publisher for a chapter in an edited book; @techreport with an institution and number for a working paper; @misc with a url for data or software.

  3. Write names as Last, First Middle, joined by and. Use the given names the publisher prints. Write a suffix in the three-part form Lucas, Jr., Robert E.: written as Lucas, Robert E., Jr. it prints as “Jr. Lucas”. Put an organization in double braces, as in {{World Bank}}. Never separate authors with commas or &.

  4. Write titles in title case, and brace only the words that must keep their capitals: proper nouns and acronyms, such as {Markov}, {Bayesian} and {DSGE}. The citation style decides the case of everything else: the current style prints the titles of articles and chapters in sentence case, so an unbraced “Markov” prints as “markov”.

  5. Give the journal’s own name, in full: “Econometrica”, not “Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society”; “Journal of Political Economy”, not “J. Polit. Econ.”.

  6. Give only the publisher’s name: “MIT Press”, not “The MIT Press” or “MIT Press Cambridge”.

  7. Write page ranges in full, with a double hyphen: 587--613.

  8. Give the year of the edition you cite, and leave out month. The author–year style does not use it, and a numeric month prints as it stands (“08 2004”).

  9. Include a doi whenever the work has one, as the bare DOI (10.2307/1913601, not a URL). Add a url only when there is no DOI. Never leave a field empty, as in doi = {}.

  10. Leave out fields a reader never sees: abstract, keywords, file, date-added, date-modified and issn.

  11. Type accented characters directly (Szőke, Poincaré) rather than as LaTeX escapes (Sz{\H{o}}ke). Both tools read UTF-8.

  12. Give each work one key, and keep keys stable. Before adding an entry, search the file for the work’s title or DOI in case it already has a key. Name a new key for its authors and year, such as HansenRichard1987; keys must be unique when case is ignored. Lectures cite by key, so renaming one means changing every lecture that cites it.

  13. Lay the entry out like the rest of the file: lower-case field names, values in braces, one field per line.

Examples#

An article:

@article{HansenRichard1987,
  author  = {Hansen, Lars Peter and Richard, Scott F.},
  title   = {The Role of Conditioning Information in Deducing Testable Restrictions Implied by Dynamic Asset Pricing Models},
  journal = {Econometrica},
  volume  = {55},
  number  = {3},
  pages   = {587--613},
  year    = {1987},
  doi     = {10.2307/1913601}
}

A book, with a suffix in the three-part form:

@book{StokeyLucas1989,
  author    = {Stokey, Nancy L. and Lucas, Jr., Robert E. and Prescott, Edward C.},
  title     = {Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics},
  publisher = {Harvard University Press},
  year      = {1989},
  doi       = {10.2307/j.ctvjnrt76}
}