Build a .bib that lasts

A .bib file is a small plain-text database of everything you might cite. Each entry has a type, a key, and a set of fields, and the same file can serve every paper you write for years. A little discipline now, in how you choose types, fill fields, and name keys, saves real pain later when a journal style suddenly demands a field you never recorded.

Anatomy of an entry

@article{knuth84,
  author  = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  title   = {Literate Programming},
  journal = {The Computer Journal},
  year    = {1984},
  volume  = {27},
  number  = {2},
  pages   = {97--111}
}

The word after @ is the entry type, which tells the style what kind of work this is and therefore which fields to expect. knuth84 is the citation key, the handle you type inside \cite{...}. Everything else is a field. The author field uses the Last, First form so the style can reliably abbreviate and sort names, and pages uses a double hyphen, which LaTeX typesets as a page-range dash.

The entry types you actually need

Six types cover almost all academic writing. Use @article for journal papers, @inproceedings for conference and workshop papers, @book for books, @phdthesis for dissertations, @techreport for institutional reports and many preprints, and @misc for anything else, including software and websites. Choosing the right type matters because styles format each one differently: an @inproceedings entry wants a booktitle (the conference name), while an @article wants a journal.

Required fields, and why validators complain

Each type has required fields, and a missing one is the most common reason a bibliography entry comes out mangled or triggers a backend warning. For @article the essentials are author, title, journal, and year; for @inproceedings, author, title, booktitle, and year. Missing year or author is the classic failure, because author-year styles literally cannot construct a citation label without them. Optional fields like volume, pages, doi, and publisher make entries more useful, so record them while the source is in front of you. You can check a whole file at once with the BibTeX validator.

Keys that survive a decade

Citation keys are forever: every \cite{knuth84} in every draft, note, and slide deck refers to that exact string, so renaming a key means hunting down every use. Pick a convention such as authorYEAR or authorYEARkeyword, apply it from day one, and never “clean up” keys in an established database. If you manage references in Zotero, the Better BibTeX plugin can generate and pin stable keys for you; see Zotero into a .bib file. For wiring the file into a document, start with From .bib key to in-text cite.