MiKTeX and proTeXt ⇒ Strange problem with one citation with MikTex

[GerryWolff]

With MikTex, I'm encountering a strange problem with one citation using BibTex: in an article where all the citations are good, there is one like this:

In connection with these issues, it has been discovered by Emma Strubell
and colleagues [?] that the process of training a large AI model can

The reference details are like this:

@INPROCEEDINGS{strubell_etal_2019,
AUTHOR = {E. Strubell and A. Ganesh and A. McCallum},
TITLE = {Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in {NLP}},
BOOKTITLE = {The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Florence, Italy. July 2019},
YEAR = 2019}

I have tried everything I can think of to get a valid citation for Emma Strubell and colleagues:

* I have uninstalled MikTex and reinstalled it, and rebooted Windows.
* I have retyped the whole paragraph and the whole of the reference details.
* I have tried to make visible any invisible characters that might be upsetting things.
* And more.

Any suggestions for how to fix this problem will be very welcome.

With thanks.

Gerry

[GerryWolff]

PS The source for that bad citation is:

In connection with these issues, it has been discovered by Emma Strubell and colleagues \cite{strubell_etal_2019} that the process of training a large AI model

Gerry

[Ijon Tichy]

Please show at least the blg-file. Recommended would be to show us a minimal working example, tell us how you do the compilation process (you need at least, pdflatex + bibtex/biber + pdflatex + pdflatex) and show the blg-file and citation warnings or error messages from the log-file.

[GerryWolff]

Thanks very much for these points. Here's a bit more info:

* The blg-file contains lines like this:

Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "sp_autonomous_robots"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "wolff_1988"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "chomsky_1965"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "strubell_etal_2019"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "sp_winograd_schemas"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "davis_marcus_2015"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "schmidhuber_2015"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "spcsrk2_2019"

All of these, except strubell_etal_2019, work fine.

* The log file contains just one line like this:

LaTeX Warning: Citation `strubell_etal_2019' on page 20 undefined on input line 414.

That identifier is indeed on line 414 in the BibTex source file. It appears to be perfectly OK. Here is the entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{strubell_etal_2019,
AUTHOR = {E. Strubell and A. Ganesh and A. McCallum},
TITLE = {Energy and policy considerations for deep learning in {NLP}},
BOOKTITLE = {The 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Florence, Italy. July 2019},
YEAR = 2019}

* I'm running pdflatex and BibTex like this:

pdflatex %1
bibtex %1
pdflatex %1
pdflatex %1

I hope that helps.

[Ijon Tichy]

* The blg-file contains lines like this:

Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "sp_autonomous_robots"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "wolff_1988"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "chomsky_1965"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "strubell_etal_2019"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "sp_winograd_schemas"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "davis_marcus_2015"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "schmidhuber_2015"
Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "spcsrk2_2019"

All of these, except strubell_etal_2019, work fine.

BibTeX cannot add not existing database entries to the bbl-file. So it is absolute impossible, that those entries work fine. If these entries work, either this is not the blg-file of the last bibtex run or not of the bibtex run that generated the bbl file that is used by LaTeX. Please make a minimal working example inclusive the bib-file with the relevant entries.

[GerryWolff]

I've discovered the reason for the problem! The source file for the paper was using predefined bibliographic entries instead of my BibTex source file. Hence the new citation was not being picked up.

Many thanks indeed for your help!

Gerry