How to correct blank space accompanied by comma when referencing a website

Question

I am using one of the methods suggested in here as shown below:

@misc{Bluetoothcore,
title = {At the core of everything Bluetooth},
 howpublished = { \url   {https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/bluetooth-core-specification}},
publisher = {Bluetooth},  
note = "[Online; accessed 20-Jun-2019]"
}

and I am using these in the bibiographic section of my paper:

\bibliographystyle{elsarticle-harv}
\bibliography{bibfile}{}

but this is converted into an ugly format (empty space followed by ,) in my references as shown below

Appreciate any help correcting this. I can change the formatting style as well.

List of packages I am using:

    \usepackage{url}
     \usepackage{changepage}
    %\usepackage{natbib}
     \usepackage{times} 
    % \usepackage[hyphens]{url}
    % \usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}
    % \hypersetup{breaklinks=true}
    % \urlstyle{same}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{caption}
\usepackage{subcaption}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{enumerate}
\usepackage{verbatim}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{graphicx}
%\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{mathtools}
\usepackage[toc,page]{appendix}
\usepackage[ruled]{algorithm2e}
\usepackage{float}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{amssymb}
%\usepackage[hyphens]{url}
%\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}
%\hypersetup{breaklinks=true}
\usepackage{mathtools}
\usepackage{afterpage}

\graphicspath {{figures/}} 
% \usepackage{algcompatible}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{graphicx}
%\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
\usepackage{caption}
%\usepackage{subfigure}
\usepackage{subcaption}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{mathtools}
%\usepackage[ruled]{algorithm2e }
\usepackage{mathptmx}
\usepackage[11pt]{moresize}
\usepackage{anyfontsize}
\usepackage{t1enc}
\usepackage{algorithm2e,setspace}
\usepackage{mwe}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{flexisym}
\usepackage{makecell}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\newcommand{\tabitem}{~~\llap{\textbullet}~~}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{tabularx, makecell}%
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{etoolbox} %
\usepackage{amsmath}            % Para las referencias a ecuaciones con \eqref
%\usepackage{epstopdf}           % Para poder insertar figuras .eps al compilar con PDFLATEX
\usepackage{flushend} 
\usepackage[figuresright]{rotating}

the formatting is controlled by the biblatex or bibtex style about which you have given no information. Presumably you are using a style that has mandatory fields for the @misc type that are expected at those points but if you provide no informaion about the input it's hard to help — David Carlisle, Feb 17 '22 at 17:57
The elsarticle-harv bibliography style produces authoryear-style citation call-outs. Hence there's a serious problem if you have an entry that's lacking an author (or editor) field and/or a year field. For the entry at hand, have you considered adding the field author = {{Bluetooth SIG}}? — Mico, Feb 17 '22 at 18:16
To be precise, you are not suggesting to shorten a title and use it as the author? if not, there are other references that suffer the lacking of authors, so not sure what the best approach is? Maybe changing the bib style to something else? any suggestion? — Mohsen Sichani, Feb 17 '22 at 18:30
I think I can use any of these styles:https://booksite.elsevier.com/9780081019375/content/Elsevier%20Standard%20Reference%20Styles.pdf — Mohsen Sichani, Feb 17 '22 at 18:35
Thanks @Mico for pointing out the issue, I changed \bibliographystyle{unsrtnat} and added \usepackage[numbers]{natbib}. This changed the styling to Vancouver and solved the problem. This styling seems acceptable by Elsevier and other scientific journals https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/library/public/LaTeX-example-Vancouver-apr-2019.pdf and https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Biblatex_citation_styles — Mohsen Sichani, Feb 17 '22 at 18:49
Maybe if you add your/mine comments as the solution, I can accept it and help others to find the solution faster rather than going through the comments — Mohsen Sichani, Feb 17 '22 at 18:50
unrelated but you should really clean up that preamble, don't load enumerate and enumitem together, ther are incompatible, don't load enumitem 3 times, don't load graphicx three times don't load mathtools 3 times don't load amsmath at all if you load mathtools (you load it three times) don't load mwe or t1enc don't load booktabs three times.... — David Carlisle, Feb 17 '22 at 20:10

Mico · Accepted Answer · 2022-02-17T20:43:50.580

(this answer builds on and combines some of the information accumulated in the comments posted below the query)

You mention that you employ the elsarticle-harv bibliography style. This style is designed to generate authoyear-style citation call-outs. This can only go well if all cited entries have both an author (or editor) field and a year field. But because the entry

@misc{Bluetoothcore,
title = {At the core of everything {Bluetooth}},
howpublished = {\url{https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/bluetooth-core-specification}},
publisher = {Bluetooth},  
note = "[Online; accessed 20-Jun-2019]"
}

is lacking both an author field and a year field, the only thing this bib style can do is to start off the formatted bibliographic entry with a blank space [in place of the missing author information], followed by a comma, followed by another blank space [in place of the missing year information], followed by a period (aka "full stop").

What to do?

One remedy would be to backfill the needed fields, so that authoyear-style citation call-outs become meaningful.
If you have the choice of switching the bibliography style to one that produces numeric-style citation call-outs and doesn't sort the bibliographic entries in alphabetical order of authors' surnames, you needn't fix the bib entries at all. Two such bib styles, which also happen to work well with the natbib citation management package, are unsrtnat and elsarticle-num.

How to correct blank space accompanied by comma when referencing a website

1 Answers1