Bibliography Author names out of order and with no Comma

Question

I a am writing a simple report with bibliography in a separate .bib file. I have one bibliography entry like:

@Misc{SVD,
  title={myTitle},
  author= { Kotidis , Faloutsos ,Labrinidis},
  howpublished = {\url {http://..}},
}

but when I see the result in references it is

where names are out of order but mainly between Name 1 and 2 there is no comma.

To load my bibliography I use:

\usepackage{natbib}
...
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{references}

Any possible explanation for this behavior?

Thanks for any reply

Welcome to TeX.SX! Use "and" instead of commas to separate multiple authors, see How to properly write multiple authors in bibtex file? — diabonas, Sep 20 '17 at 10:27

Mico · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-20T10:53:34.527

Since you're using the plain bibliography style, the field

author= { Kotidis , Faloutsos ,Labrinidis},

is interpreted as featuring a single author with surname-component "Kotidis", junior-component "Faloutsos", and first-name-component "Labrinidis". Note that commas in the author field do not separate authors; instead, they only serve to separate various components of a single (composite) name. In the formatted output, you therefore get

Labrinidis Kotidis, Faloutsos

Observe that the assumed junior component -- "Faloutsos" -- is separated with a comma from the assumed firstname and surname components.

What's going on?! There's both a syntactic mistake and a content mistake in your author field. The syntax mistake is that you're using commas instead of the keyword and to separate the authors. The content mistake is that you've failed to provide the first names for the three authors. You really ought to write the field as either

author = "Yannis Kotidis and Christos Faloutsos and Alexandros Labrinidis",

or

author = "Kotidis, Yannis and Faloutsos, Christos and Labrinidis, Alexandros",

With either form, BibTeX will parse the field correctly, and the bibliography style is left determine if full or abbreviated first names should be shown. The plain bibliography style is programmed to show the full first names, by the way.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Sep 20 '17 at 10:34

The formatting of your BibTeX entry is wrong. You should provide first and last name and separate each author using "and". The separation using commas is used to separate first and last names, this is why your BibTeX entry is all mixed up. I have attached an example below. There are also different keywords like @article or @misc that will print different things in your bibliography in the document. This is also a common source of errors.

@article{van2008multi,
  title={Multi-agent systems},
  author={Van der Hoek, Wiebe and Wooldridge, Michael},
  journal={Foundations of Artificial Intelligence},
  volume={3},
  pages={887--928},
  year={2008},
  publisher={Elsevier}
}

I always use the citation export function on online libraries where you can get a readily formatted BibTeX entry. Most of the time it is sufficient to search for your literature on Google Scholar and use the cite function, where you can find a BibTeX entry that you can copy/paste to your .bib file.

While it's certainly true that Google Scholar provides convenient methods for generating bib entries, you may want to mention explicitly that the contents of all entries obtained from Google Scholar need to be double-checked for factual and syntax errors. — Mico, Nov 10 '17 at 03:35

Bibliography Author names out of order and with no Comma

2 Answers2