How do I cite RFCs?

Question

What's the right way to cite RFC's of the IETF (Internet Engineering Taskforce)? like this one? That is, what kind of document should this be considered as? Is the IETF the author, the organization, or the publisher? etc.

Answer 1

There's a draft of IETF recommendations for citing RFCs in BibTeX. Using these recommendations, RFCs are considered as a technical report. The authors would be the people who wrote the RFC, and the publisher and organization would be "RFC Editor".

In your example, the BibTeX entry following the recommendations would look something like this:

@techreport{rfc4180,
  author = {Y. Shafranovich},
  title = {Common Format and MIME Type for Comma-Separated Values (CSV) Files},
  howpublished = {Internet Requests for Comments},
  type = {RFC},
  number = 4180,
  year = {2005},
  month = {10},
  issn = {2070-1721},
  publisher = {RFC Editor},
  institution = {RFC Editor},
  url = {https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4180.txt}
}

See also: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/59284/citing-rfcs-with-biblatex