How to selectively choose the items to output in Bibliography in Latex?

Question

I'd like to ask about choosing item for Bibliography part in Latex.

The situation is like this: I currently use JabRef for bibliography management (great software), (engine MikTex 2.8, IDE TexnicCenter1.0). The package I use for writing thesis is ClassicThesis by Miede and Arsclassica as a support package.

in the main text file it uses natbib package to handle bibliography:

\usepackage[square,numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}

However when I copy BibTex from different authors, different publishers, they often provide various content on the paper. Some are not necessary.

For example:

This Bibtex Source (some provide in very detail like this, some give another information)

@ARTICLE{Lowe2004,
  author = {Lowe, David G.},
  title = {Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints},
  journal = {Int. J. Comput. Vision},
  year = {2004},
  volume = {60},
  pages = {91--110},
  month = {November},
  acmid = {996342},
  address = {Hingham, MA, USA},
  doi = {10.1023/B:VISI.0000029664.99615.94},
  issn = {0920-5691},
  issue = {2},
  keywords = {image matching, invariant features, object recognition, scale invariance},
  numpages = {20},
  publisher = {Kluwer Academic Publishers},
  url = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=993451.996342}
}

would produce:

David G. Lowe. Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. Int. J. Comput. Vision, 60:91–110, November 2004. ISSN 0920-5691. doi: 10. 1023/B:VISI.0000029664.99615.94. URL http://portal.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=993451.996342.

But I need to comply with the format required by my school, it closely follows IEEE format. With the information above, the output should be:

(author name small caps)David G. Lowe, "Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints", (italic journal name)Int. Journal of Computer Vision, Vol. 60, pp. 91–110, Nov 2004. ISSN 0920-5691

Is there a neat way to do that? I think it's very tiresome and unpractical to remove all the unnecessary information form the Bib source they provided.

Answer 1

In general, the bibliography style file (.bst) controls how the fields present in the .bib file are presented, including which are omitted. While hand-editing those files is almost hopeless, the custom-bib package can help you create a style file that suits your requirements. Alternatively, many bst files have already been created - maybe somebody has one for your school.

Answer 2

Check the bibtool preprocessor for BibTeX: it will let you specify in a configuration file how to process your bibliography including operaitons such as adding and deleting fields, selecting regexps, etc. To obtained detailed formatting corresponding to the IEEE format, you may have to move away from natbib, and use the official IEEE bibliographic format. BibTeX can naturally be configured for that.

Answer 3

Thanks! I finally found an answer to my problem. There are actually IEEE style package for controlling the output bibliography. I first tried IEEEtr style (standard LaTex style for IEEE) but everything messed up. For those who use natbib package, you should run with IEEEtranN (or IEEEtranSN for sorted bibliography) style by Michael Shell.

\bibliographystyle{IEEEtranSN}
\bibliography{Bibliography}

actually i want a little bit more freedom by changing the style (making it "hybrid" between ACM and IEEE, and abbrev all the transaction or "International". This can be done by tweaking the .bst file but I'm fine with the current result.