In article , Eric Flesch
writes:

On Thu, 09 Apr 2020, "Phillip Helbig wrote:

[about how to cite articles in JCAP which has an unorthodox numbering
scheme]

So for, say, volume 2013, issue 5, id or page 37 there would be the
choice of
5, 37, 2013
or
2013, 13, 2013.

What do people here do? Is there any official recommendation?

On the ADS page
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/20....037G/abstract
they use the form 2013JCAP...05..037G
so I suppose it's safe to use a variant of that.

That's what I went with. ADS is not an official recommendation, but is
to some extent a de-facto standard. One reason I went with it is that
it conforms to ADS. It also avoids having the same number twice (as the
volume number and the year), which looks strange and like a mistake. It
also follows their own standard about how the articles should be cited
(the "cite as" feature in the articles themselves). It also makes it
easier to actually find the article if one doesn't have a direct link.

So in many respects the issue number plays the role of the volume number
for other journals.

On the other hand, they explicitly say that the volume number is the
same as the year. Also, the issue number starts over at 1 every year,
whereas volume numbers (almost?) always continue to increase throughout
the life of the journal. (With issue and page numbers, there are two
conventions. Sometimes the issue numbers start over at 1 with each new
volume, sometimes they just continue. Usually, page numbers continue
throughout the issues within a volume, but sometimes they start over
with each issue, in which case the issue number is actually needed to
(quickly) find the article.)

Fortunately, BibTeX (which I still use despite the fact that some say
that it is obsolete and BibLaTeX is the best new thing) can take care of
all this automatically. I recently had occasion to create a new .bst
(BibTeX style) file. Anyone who has looked at one of these knows that
it is written in a rather low-level language and is thus hard to
understand. However, on most LaTeX systems one can just type "latex
makebst" and answer the questions and a .bst will be generated
automatically.

I suspect that traditional reference lists will be with us for a while
to come. I've seen some papers with, in addition to the traditional
information, for each reference links to the DOI, the ADS entry, and the
arXiv entry (each of these might or might not exist for a given
article). Since the ADS bibcode has a standard format, it is possible
to generate it automatically from the information in a typical BibTeX
entry (at least if one uses the issue number for the volume number for
JCAP), and ADS has links to the DOI and arXiv if they exist, so it
should be possible to write a program which reads a BibTeX file and
updates it with those three new fields (DOI, ADS, and arXiv links),
retrieving them from ADS on the fly. Has anyone ever done this?