SOME ADVICE ON LATEX AND BIBTEX

If you use BibTeX to generate your bibliography, everything should be
nicely formatted.  It will take care of citations for you.

The idea of BibTeX is that you create a file containing the source for
your references as a series of fields.  The type of the form tells
BibTeX how to treat it.  You can easily Google "bibtex entry types" to
find how to do these.  I give you some templates below.

At the location where your bibliography will appear in the paper, you
should have two commands.  The bibliostyle command tells BibTex how to
format your bibliography.  In technical papers ieeetr or alpha are
common.  BibTeX will order the items in your reference list
appropriately for the style you specify. The bibliography command
gives the name of the biblio file, which should have a .bib extension.
You just specify the name if it's in the same directory as your
paper.  Otherwise you specify the path (absolute or relative). 

\bibliographystyle{alpha} 
\bibliography{mypaper}

Citations in the paper are of the form \cite{tag}, where tag is the
first field of the corresponding biblio entry.  The key field is used
to alphabetize entries.  Suppose the entry in the biblio file is:

@Article(PrinceFelderBrent,
        key={PrinceFelderBrent},
        author={Michael J. Prince and Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent},
        title={Does Faculty Research Improve Undergraduate Teaching? 
               An Analysis of Existing and Potential Synergies},
        journal={Journal of Engineering Education},
        volume={96},
        number={4},
        pages={283--294},
        year={2007},
        annote={I liked this paper.})

Some fields are optional and some are required.  The annote field is
for comments to yourself;  it doesn't appear in the paper.  A note
field does appear and could be used for a URL stating when you
retrieved it.

Note that author names should be separated with "and."  Commas are
treated specially by BibTex so use them for lastname, firstname pairs
or just avoid them entirely.  If you need to include then for
something like "Hunt, Jr." then put the whole thing in braces.
Anything you want capitalized or left as is should be in brackets,
e.g., {IEEE}, {Hunt, Jr.}, {LaTeX}. 

A citation to this article within your paper would be
\cite{PrinceFelderBrent}.  This would create a reference at that point
in the paper in the appropriate format.  

Note: you need to run LaTeX and BibTeX several times to get the
references resolved.  Typically, you'd do the following (assuming your
paper is called mypaper.tex and the biblio file is mypaper.bib.

command to run            comment

latex mypaper             % creates a list of citations in the paper
bibtex mypaper            % searches the bibliography file for the missing citations
latex mypaper             % tries to include them into the paper, doesn't get them all
latex mypaper             % succeeds in including any remaining 

Do a similar thing if you are using pdflatex.

If you end up with a citation like [?], either the reference was not
found in your bibliography or you need to re-run bibtex and latex.

The point of a bibliography entry is to allow the reader to find the
source.  That's the point of the required fields in bibliography
entries. If the resource is an online source, you should include a
url.  Below is a sample I found online though there are other ways to
do this.

@MISC{maldives,
   author =       {Darlene Connoly},
   title =        {Controversy in the Maldives},
   editor =       {Surfline.com},
   month =        {August},
   year =         {2012},
   url = {http://www.surfline.com/surf-news/maldives-surf-access-controversy-update_75296/},
   note =         {[Online; posted 27-August-2012]},
 }

If the url is too long for the line, you can use \url{ } to wrap it: 
\url{www.surfline.com/surf-news/maldives-surf-access-controversy-update_75296/}
but you'll need to have  \usepackage{url} in the beginning part of your .tex file. 

Also, you can include \- at any point in a word or url.  This tells
LaTeX that it can introduce a break at that point and add a hyphen if
needed.  This is useful if a word at the end of a line is too long,
but LaTeX can't figure how to break it, e.g., "through." 

Below are some templates for various types of bibliography
entries. There are many others that you can find by Googling around.

@Article(,
        key={},
        author={},
        title={},
        journal={},
        volume={},
        number={},
        pages={},
        month={},
        year={20},
        annote={})

@Book(,
        key={},
        author={},
        title={},
        publisher={},
        address={},
        year={20},
        annote={})

@InCollection(,
        key={},
        author={},
        title={},
        booktitle={},
        publisher={},
        address={},
        editor={},
        pages={},
        year={20},
        annote={})

@Misc(,
        key={},
        author={},
        title={},
        organization={},
        howpublished={},
        month={},
        year={20},
        annote={})

@PhDThesis(,
        key={},
        author={},
        title={},
        school={},
        year={20},
        annote={})

Below are some sample bibliography items that illustrate some common
issues. 

@Article(PrinceFelderBrent,
        key={PrinceFelderBrent},
        author={Michael J. Prince and Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent},
        title={Does Faculty Research Improve Undergraduate Teaching? 
               An Analysis of Existing and Potential Synergies},
        journal={Journal of Engineering Education},
        volume={96},
        number={4},
        pages={283--294},
        year={2007},
        annote={})

@Misc(YoungCurci,
        key={YoungCurci},
        author={William D. Young and Michael Curci},
        title={A Layered Approach to Military Supply Chain Risk Management},
        organization={Institute for Advanced Technology, University of Texas at Austin},
        howpublished={unpublished},
        month={June},
        year={2011},
        annote={})

@TechReport(CurciYoung,
        key={CurciYoungEDTCM},
        author={M. Curci and W. Young and W. Barnes and M. Hummel and A. White},
        title={Final Report: Electronic Digital Threats Countermeasures},
        organization={Institute for Advanced Technology, University of Texas at Austin},
        type={Technical report},
        month={June},
        year={2009},
        annote={})

@TechReport(AR25-1,
        key={Department of the Army},
        author={Department of the Army},
        title={Army Regulation 25-1: Army Knowledge Management 
               and Information Technology},
        institution={Headquarters Department of the Army},
        month={December 4},
        year={2008},
        annote={})

@Book(Astin,
        key={Astin},
        author={A.W. Astin},
        title={What Matters in College?  Four Critical Years Revisited},
        publisher={Jossey-Bass Inc.},
        address={San Francisco},
        year={1994},
        annote={})

@Article(Feldman,
        key={Feldman},
        author={K.A. Feldman},
        title={Research Productivity and Scholarly Accomplishment of College Teachers as Related 
               to their Instructional Effectiveness:  A Review and Exploration},
        journal={Research in Higher Education},
        volume={26},
        pages={227--298},
        year={1987},
        annote={})


The following are some common issues using LaTeX in documents:

Frequently, I notice that quotation marks are missing, including
single quotes.  That can happen if you format your paper in Word and
copy it to LaTeX.  These use different characters for quotes, single
and double.  After you run LaTeX, make sure that the quotes are
appearing, and do a global substitution for any that are in the input
but not appearing in the formatted version.

In typesetting, the double quote at the left end of a string is
different from the one at the right end.  LaTeX turns the keyboard
double quote character " into a right double quote, which looks odd at
the left end of a quotation.  You can avoid this by typing a left
double quote as `` and a right double quote as ''.  Note those are
typed as two single quotes of the appropriate style.  Emacs in LaTeX
mode will convert them for you automatically. 

When using LaTeX, some characters render oddly.  For example, some
characters like "<" and ">" don't render as you'd expect.  Instead,
you'll get an inverted "!" and an inverted "?".  If you need < and >
you can use \textless or \textgreater, respectively. 

If you include a figure or table, make sure it's readable.  If in
two column format, you can use figure* or table* to produce a
floating figure / table that will span two columns.  

Use appropriate typographic conventions in your text.  For example,
computer commands are typically rendered in fixed-width typewriter
font.  You can do this in LaTeX with the \tt{command} directive, where
command is the command string.  If your command contains special
characters such as >, you can use the verbatim environment: \verb|cat
blah > foo|.  Note that you don't use \verb{...}.  Instead, for
delimiters use any character that doesn't appear in the string, with
the same character used at both ends of the string.