92 References and Bibtex
Written by Yena Joo and last updated on 7 October 2021.
92.1 Introduction
Citation is very important to include in your paper to provide a proper credit to the authors, and to avoid plagiarisms when it is publicly published. Of course we can manually cite and reference using citation maker online and copy and paste them, but we can also use some functions in R Markdown and use BibTeX to cite!
In this lesson, you will learn how to cite references!
Highlights:
- BibTeX
citation()
92.2 Bibliographies
92.2.1 BIB file?
.bib file is a text document created by a LaTeX program that contains a list of bibliographic citations in BibTeX formatting. By using this file, it enables bibliographies to be searched and published in your paper.
By using BibTex, you would need to type each reference only once, and the citations will be automatically formatted consistently. You would first need to use the bibliography metadata field in YAML.
---
title: "Title"
author: "Author"
date: "Feb 7, 2021"
output: html_document
bibliography: references.bib
--- A BibTeX database is a plain text file with an extension .bib.
The manual BibTex database for the citation should look like this:
@Manual{this string is a label when you cite this,
title = {Title of the reference},
author = {Author of the literature},
organization = {Organization},
address = {address},
year = {published year (2020)},
url = {https://www.the website url},
}Here is an example of the citation of a book:
@book{label,
author = {},
year = {},
title = {},
publisher = {},
address = {}
}Note that citation of a book must include author, year, title, and publisher fields.
The following is an example of an article citation:
@article{label,
author = {},
title = {},
journal = {},
volume = {},
year = {},
pages = {}
}Note that the citation of an article requires author, title, journal, and year fields.
Also, the order of the fields is not important, and you can create bib files that you end up don’t use because BibTex will put in the list of references only the ones you used at the end of your paper.
It might be confusing first, but the BibTex format could be easily converted using various websites and tools available on the internet.
92.2.3 Citing R packages using citation() function
Not only citing websites or literature you have used for the paper, but you also would want to cite your R packages from a reproducibility perspective, or to acknowledge the work that people spent to create packages. If you choose to cite R packages as well, here is how.
You need to cite the packages using the citation("package name") function. The function returns both text version and a BibTeX entry for it, if a package has more than one reference then only the text versions are shown. You can get the citation information for R packages like this:
print(citation("knitr"))
#>
#> To cite the 'knitr' package in publications use:
#>
#> Yihui Xie (2021). knitr: A General-Purpose Package
#> for Dynamic Report Generation in R. R package
#> version 1.37.
#>
#> Yihui Xie (2015) Dynamic Documents with R and
#> knitr. 2nd edition. Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN
#> 978-1498716963
#>
#> Yihui Xie (2014) knitr: A Comprehensive Tool for
#> Reproducible Research in R. In Victoria Stodden,
#> Friedrich Leisch and Roger D. Peng, editors,
#> Implementing Reproducible Computational Research.
#> Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN 978-1466561595
#>
#> To see these entries in BibTeX format, use
#> 'print(<citation>, bibtex=TRUE)', 'toBibtex(.)', or
#> set 'options(citation.bibtex.max=999)'.92.4 Exercises
92.4.1 Question 1
Why is citation important (Select all that apply)?
a. To provide authors a proper credit.
b. To avoid plagiarisms when it is published publicly.
c. To be organized.
d. To monetize the paper.
92.4.2 Question 2
Which is incorrect about a BIB file?
a. It is a text document.
b. When using BibTex, you need to type reference every time you cite it.
c. You need to use bibliography metadata field in YAML.
d. All of the above.
92.4.3 Question 3
Which function for citing R packages was introduced in this lesson?
a. reference()
b. citation()
c. bibliography()
d. resource()