How to cite an authorless report in JabRef/Bibtex

Question

I am learning to use bibtex/jabref in the context of a literature review and would like to cite the following report:

https://www.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/379567.pdf

The report is compiled by the USACE (US Army Corps of Engineers) and does not have an explicit author. In the summary report it is mentioned that this report was a result of "workshops" with a "panel" of experts. It includes the expert's names however no indication whether they actually contributed to writing the report itself.

The way I'm logging this into JabRef is as follows:

@TechReport{USACE2015,
  author      = {{US Army Corps of Engineers}},
  title       = {North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive: resilient adaptation to increasing risk physical depth damage function summary report},
  institution = {US Army Corps of Engineers},
  year        = {2015},
  file        = {:10A_PhysicalDepthDmgFxSummary_26Jan2015.pdf:PDF},
}

However, I'm a bit annoyed that I have to mention USACE in two distinct required fields, namely the author and the institution. Is there a more correct way to cite "authorless" technical reports using bibtex/jabref? Perhaps this is not a technical report at all?

Thanks in advance for your help

Answer 1

In the end, you should format your citations according to the style guide of the journal you are targeting. Which BibTeX fields you have to use depends on the bibliographystyle you are using in your document.

For example, IEEE journals require that the name of the institution appears after the title of the report, see here on page 7.

With the ieeetran bibliography style, the author field is printed before the title, while the institution field is not printed at all. In order to fit the journal style (institution name after title), one needs to remove the author field and enter the institution in the type field, which is a bit of a hack:

@TechReport{USACE2015,
    title       = {{North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive: resilient adaptation to increasing risk physical depth damage function summary report}},
    type      = {{US Army Corps of Engineers}},
    year        = {2015},
    file        = {:10A_PhysicalDepthDmgFxSummary_26Jan2015.pdf:PDF},
}

produces the desired output:

In short: check the citation style of your target journal and try to mimic that. If you also want JabRef to sort your references properly by institution, you will also need to include the institution in the institution field.