Help on CTAN

How should I reference packages on CTAN?

Links for packages

Links for packages should point to the package's page. For instance the URL https://ctan.org/pkg/tex points to the package page for TeX. This URL can be considered immutable permalinks. The CTAN team hardly tries not to alter them at all. Even for the rare case of deleted packages an informative text is left behind.

Warning:

The addresses in the archive may change. Such an address is for example https://ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex. Occasionally the location of a package in the archive changes. This can be caused by new or altered classifications of packages. Thus beware and do not use URLs to the archive as references.

Note:

You should accompany the link with a date of reference to document which version you have seen. Even if the link itself persists it's contents might change.

References with BibLaTeX

If you are using BibLaTeX you can use the entry type @Online to describe a package on CTAN. The following example demonstrates how such an entry can look like:

@online{ctan:pkg:luatex,
  author =        {The {Lua\TeX} Team},
  title =         {luatex -- The {Lua\TeX} engine},
  url =           {https://ctan.org/pkg/luatex},
  urldate =       {Retrieved 2020-10-23},
  organisation =  {Comprehensive \TeX{} Archive Network}
}

This results with the bibliographystyle alphabetic approximately in the following output:

[Tea20]

The LuaTeX Team. luatex – The LuaTeX engine. Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. https://ctan.org/pkg/luatex, Retrieved 2020-10-23. 2020.

References with BibTeX

If you are using BibTeX you can use the entry type @Misc to describe a package on CTAN. The following example demonstrates how such an entry can look like:

@misc{ctan:pkg:luatex,
  author =        {The {Lua\TeX} Team},
  title =         {luatex -- The {Lua\TeX} engine},
  howpublished =  {Comprehensive \TeX{} Archive Network},
  year =          2020,
  note =          {https://ctan.org/pkg/luatex, Retrieved 2020-10-23}
}

This results with the bibliographystyle alpha approximately in the following output:

[Tea20]

The LuaTeX Team. luatex – The LuaTeX engine. Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. 2020. https://ctan.org/pkg/luatex, Retrieved 2020-10-23.