What do I need to be aware of when checking citations before handing in a thesis?

Question

I typically use the following workflow when citing papers:

• search paper name on Google Scholar chrome plugin
• click cite -> BibTeX -> copy BibTeX into references in Overleaf (LaTeX)

I once had a conversation with a PhD student (whom I don't know personally or have any contact with) who said I need to be careful with references elicited in such a way. I can't recall anymore, however, what his full point was.

Now I am wondering how I should check source for source that I've cited in order to make sure that everything is 100% correct.

Is there a well established/recommended process in doing that?

Answer 1

I assume that you have a copy of every paper that you intend to cite since you wouldn't be citing a paper unless you had read it. With that in mind, the easiest way to check the citations is simply to compare the downloaded citation information with the information that you can typically find on the first page of each article. That, at least, is what I always do!

Answer 2

Whenever you are consuming somebody else's BibTeX, it's useful to check for some specific issues that commonly occur with BibTeX. Mangling capitalization is common in human names and paper titles - which you would see in the final output even if the .bib file looks OK. Sometimes the parts of names are given incorrectly, or are written in a way that looks normal in the .bib but will be horribly wrong once all the compilation steps have taken their turn.

You should also do a "global pass" to make sure bibliography entries from different sources are consistent. Journal and conference proceeding titles may appear differently depending on the source: "SIGCOMM '22", "SIGCOMM 2022", "Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2022" and "Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference" are all the same event, but if you have obtained .bib entries from several sources then they could all appear in your bibliography, inconsistently. Similarly, sources may differ as to whether they give the publication month, or the issue number, or both, for a monthly journal. Books might have a city of publication, or not, even for the same publisher, and the publisher's name might not appear consistently (consider "OUP" vs. "Oxford University Press").

These problems can be noticed by looking at your final formatted bibliography carefully, and comparing against the actual authoritative sources, i.e. the publications themselves, for how the various names, titles and metadata ought to appear.