The BibTeX Cheat Sheet: Common Errors and How to Fix Them Before You Submit

A .bib file feels simple until it isn't. The errors that show up most often aren't exotic — they're small mismatches between your \cite{} keys and your BibTeX entries that are easy to introduce and easy to miss until compilation (or conversion) fails.

The errors that come up again and again

• Citation key typos — \cite{smith2024} in the text but the entry is keyed Smith2024 or smith_2024 in the .bib file. Keys are case-sensitive.
• Uncited entries — references sitting in your .bib file that never got cited anywhere in the document. Harmless for compilation, but some journals flag unused bibliography entries during review.
• Duplicate keys — two entries sharing the same citation key, which silently picks one and drops the other.
• Missing DOIs — increasingly expected by journals and indexing services, and easy to forget when building a .bib file by hand.
• Wrong entry type — using @article for a conference paper that should be @inproceedings, which changes which fields get pulled into the formatted citation.
• Out-of-order references — for citation styles like CSE Name-Year that require alphabetical ordering, an unsorted bibliography is a formatting error, not just a cosmetic one.

Why these are worth catching before conversion, not after

A citation key mismatch doesn't usually throw a hard error — it just silently renders as [?] or drops the reference entirely. That's the kind of thing that's easy to miss in a 20-page document and embarrassing to catch after submission.

Automating the check

Stemdoc's Preflight check runs specifically for this: it cross-references every \cite{} key in your document against your uploaded .bib file and flags:

• Citation keys with no matching bibliography entry
• Bibliography entries never cited in the text
• Unsorted references where your citation style requires alphabetical or sequence ordering
• Missing DOIs and other reference-quality signals, including an unusually high rate of self-citation or a reference list weighted heavily toward outdated sources

It runs before conversion, as part of both the Text and Citations tabs — so you fix the .bib file once instead of discovering the mismatch in the final Word document. Read more about what preflight checks in this walkthrough of the full check list, or upload your .bib file directly to see it in action.