DBLP FAQ: What is the preferred format to enter publications into DBLP?

DBLP was started in 1993 as a pure HTML application. Later essential parts were converted to XML, but the input "language" remains to be in HTML style. The idea is to enter tables of contents (TOCs) in a format, which is very close to their appearance on the DBLP TOC web pages.

The TOC of a journal issue is the smallest unit of information we usually enter. For a first example compare

the input file of a journal issue, and
the DBLP table of contents page of the journal volume, the issue is part of.

A TOC entry, that is the bibliographic description of paper, always has the same format:

It is started with a <li>-tag,
the names of the authors are separated by commas,
the last author name is sepatated from the title by a colon,
the title must end with a period, question mark, or exclamation point, the title should use mixed upper/lower case letters, completely capitalised titles are not acceptable,
the page numbers should be specified by an interval ( from-to ). If there are no page numbers, please use the null value '0-'.
The <ee>-element is optional: It may be used to specify the URL of an 'electronic edition' of the paper.

A sequence of TOC entries always has to be placed into an <ul>-element. Empty <ul>-elements are illegal. You may add additional text between <ul>-elements, for an example look at input file / DBLP page.

For conference proceedings the input format is very similar. Our input file example shows the main difference: HTML <h2>-elements (and <h4>, <h4>, ...) may be used organize large tables of contents. For DBLP users tables of contents are simply more readable if the papers are grouped by sessions etc. as in our example.

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