Cite page of paper vs page of proceedings

Question

I am currently writing my thesis and I use several papers that are available als single PDFs like this one

I did not want to write the bibtex on my own, so I searched online and found this:

@inproceedings{Rozinat:2005:CTM:2179586.2179604,
 author = {Rozinat, A. and van der Aalst, W. M. P.},
 title = {Conformance Testing: Measuring the Fit and Appropriateness of Event Logs and Process Models},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Business Process Management},
 series = {BPM'05},
 year = {2006},
 isbn = {3-540-32595-6, 978-3-540-32595-6},
 location = {Nancy, France},
 pages = {163--176},
 numpages = {14},
 url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11678564_15},
 doi = {10.1007/11678564_15},
 acmid = {2179604},
 publisher = {Springer-Verlag},
 address = {Berlin, Heidelberg},
} 

The problem: When citing a particular page of this paper, I use the page number of the single article PDF because I don't have access to the proceedings book as cited in my bibtex file.

Is this a valid practice or should the page number equal the page number in the proceedings book?

If not, how would a correct bibtex look for this single PDF?

Answer 1

@cgross My papers also tend to have many Mathematical equations. Sometimes, I only cite the paper without giving any reference to a Equation number from the other paper because I assume that the reader would read that paper before understanding mine. If there are some Math equations from the other paper that I want to use in my paper, I simply write "Please refer to Equation 6 in [RA06]". You are right about the page numbers as they don't match, so generally I refer by Equation numbers rather than the page numbers. What you wrote ("XY is defined as follows [RA06]: " and "XY is defined as follows [RA06, p. 163-176]: ") can also be adopted slightly differently. That is simply copy that Equation from the other paper in your thesis by matching with the mathematical notations that you have used in your thesis, and simply say in one line that this equation has been taken from [RA06]. This is what I generally see in many papers. I have rarely seen anyone "citing" specific page number unless the content is copied from a book. I hope it helps.

Answer 2

Page numbers are largely irrelevant. There are not so many dead tree copies around, and a digital copy may be modified. In that case, searching for the title on it is trivial. You are providing the DOI, that is a permanent identificator, so you don't have to worry about it.

On a practical thing, I just use DOI's API to get the citations, and leave them worry about the details:

[david@LCARS david]$ curl -LH "Accept: text/bibliography; style=bibtex" http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11678564_15

That gives you:

@article{Rozinat_2006, title={Conformance Testing: Measuring the Fit and Appropriateness of Event Logs and Process Models}, ISBN={http://id.crossref.org/isbn/978-3-540-32596-3}, ISSN={1611-3349}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11678564_15}, DOI={10.1007/11678564_15}, journal={Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, publisher={Springer Science + Business Media}, author={Rozinat, A. and der Aalst, W. M. P.}, year={2006}, pages={163–176}}

It is easy, fast to generate if you have the DOI, and minimises the risk of typos.

Answer 3

The Bibtex reference that you have cited here is from the ACM library. It gives pages = {163--176},, which are the pages from where the paper entitled Conformance Testing: Measuring the Fit and Appropriateness of Event Logs and Process Models starts and ends in the proceedings. I also write papers, and I am writing my thesis. I only use the page numbers as they are given in the ACM library Bibtex because these are the page numbers where the paper spans in the proceedings. This is a valid practice, and I have published in some top venues by following this rule.