Citing book chapter from a book series

Question

I am wondering the best practices for citing a chapter from a book which is part of a book series. I'm having trouble finding good answers online, and it seems from other articles, that there are several ways to do this.

I use Mendeley for my article/book/chapter handling, and the relevant type would be Book Section, but here I can only enter one "Title" and one "Book". My question is then if I should write the Series Name of the Name of this specific Volume in the "Book" field. Or should I completely ignore one of them?

Does the posting How to cite a book chapter written by an author who is not the editor or author of the book with BibTeX help? My guess is that you should be using the entry type @inproceedings, or its synonym, @incollection. If this doesn't help, please provide more, specific information about the publication you wish to cite. — Mico, Nov 21 '17 at 18:55
I've seen the link, but my issue is not completely how to make it look like this or that because I don't know what it should look like in the first place. The question is more on the general style in this case. Im looking to cite this chapter which, as you will see is chapter 6 of volume 65 of Advances in Quantum Chemistry. The specific volume is called Theory of Heavy Ion Collision Physics in Hadron Therapy. I am using @incollection, but Mendeley has only one title field and one book field. Not sure what goes in Book field. — Kaspar H, Nov 22 '17 at 11:51

Mico · Accepted Answer · 2017-11-22T18:41:05.190

I visited the publisher's own website for the publication in question, clicked on the "Export to BibTeX" button, and retrieved the following bibliographic entry, minimally pretty-printed. (The only substantive change I made as to take "Chapter Six:" out of the title field and create a separate chapter field to store this piece of observation.) Observe that the entry type is @incollection.

@incollection{abril-etal:2013,
  author       = "Isabel Abril and Rafael Garcia-Molina and Pablo de
                  Vera and Ioanna Kyriakou and Dimitris Emfietzoglou",
  title        = "Inelastic Collisions of Energetic Protons in Biological Media",
  editor       = "D{\v z}evad Belki{\'c}",
  booktitle    = "{Theory of Heavy Ion Collision Physics in Hadron Therapy}",
  year         = 2013,
  chapter      = 6,
  pages        = "129--164",
  series       = "Advances in Quantum Chemistry",
  publisher    = "Academic Press",
  volume       = 65,
  number       = "Supplement C",
  issn         = "0065-3276",
  doi          = "https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-396455-7.00006-6",
  url          = "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123964557000066",
}

You should be able to import this information directly into Mendeley.

Assuming this entry is stored in a bib file called mybib.bib, the following MWE, which loads the apacite citation management package and the apacite bibliography style, will format it according to APA, 6th ed. guidelines.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage[a4paper,margin=2.5cm]{geometry}
\usepackage[hyphens]{url}
\frenchspacing % optional

\usepackage[natbibapa]{apacite}
\bibliographystyle{apacite}

\begin{document}
\citet{abril-etal:2013}
\bibliography{mybib}
\end{document}

Obviously, many other bibliography styles may be used instead of apacite.

I don't know why I didn't think of simply exporting the citation from the website, but I will add this: Mendeley was the problem all along!
When importing the citation exported from the website, suddenly a "Series" field shows up for the Mendeley "Type" which is called "Book Section" (which in bibtex language is called @incollection). This field does not show up otherwise! This was the cause for my confusion all along. I have no idea how one may force this field to appear other than manually importing a citation which has it. (Dragging the pdf into Mendeley is not enough). — Kaspar H, Nov 23 '17 at 16:07
@KasparH - In my own scholarly writing, I have definitely found that I'm much better off not using a tool such as Mendeley to manage my bibtex files. For sure, I don't have to waste any time coming to grips with Mendeley's quirks and idiosyncracies -- a form of human capital of rather dubious value... — Mico, Nov 23 '17 at 16:12
May I ask how you organize your citations and pdfs then? Simply a manually created .bib file (or perhaps edited with JabRef etc) and a folder of pdfs? — Kaspar H, Nov 23 '17 at 17:06
@KasparH - I happen to use the WinEdt editor software when working on a Windows machine; it's shareware, but very reasonably priced. (Aside: I actually do most of my work on a Mac; however, because WinEdt runs only under Windows, I do have to switch to a Windows machine when it's time to edit and/reorganize some of the bib files.) From the winedt.org website, one can download the BibMacros package, which integrates beautifully with the WinEdt editor. Among the many things you'll get from the BibMacros package are super-easy ways to pretty-print, sort, and organize bib files. — Mico, Nov 23 '17 at 17:22

Citing book chapter from a book series

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