There is no citation type for URLs, per se, in the standard BibTeX styles, though Oren Patashnik (the author of BibTeX) is believed to beconsidering developing one such for use with the long-awaited BibTeX version 1.0.
The actual information that need be available in a citation of an URL is discussed at some length in the publicly available on-line extracts of ISO 690–2; the techniques below do not satisfy all the requirements of ISO 690–2, but they offer a solution that is at least available to users of today’s tools.
Until the new version of BibTeX arrives, the simplest technique is
to use the howpublished
field of the standard styles’ @misc
function. Of course, the strictures
about typesetting URLs still apply, so the
entry will look like:
@misc{..., ..., howpublished = "\url{http://...}" }
A possible alternative approach is to use BibTeX styles other than the standard ones, that already have URL entry types. Candidates are:
url
”
field in their specification; however, the typesetting offered is
somewhat feeble (though it does recognise and use
LaTeX2HTML macros if they are available, to create
hyperlinks).
webpage
entry type, and
also offers support for url
and lastchecked
fields in the other entry
types. The Perl script comes with a set of converted
versions of the standard bibliography styles. Documentation is
distributed as LaTeX source.
Another possibility is that some conventionally-published paper, technical report (or even book) is also available on the Web. In such cases, a useful technique is something like:
@techreport{..., ..., note = "Also available as \url{http://...}" }
There is good reason to use the url or hyperref
packages in this context: BibTeX has a habit of splitting
lines it considers excessively long, and if there are no space
characters for it to use as ‘natural’ breakpoints, BibTeX will
insert a comment (‘%
’) character ... which
is an acceptable character in an URL. Any current version of the
url or hyperref package detects this
“%
–end-of-line” structure in its argument, and
removes it.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=citeURL