Crthuky

I am using a custom .bst file for thesis write up and getting the above Error for few references.

documentclass[12pt]article
usepackagenatbib
begindocument

This is an example fo citation citepabdelhamid2012mac. This is another citation citepagrawal1994fast, ali1997partial. citetali1997partial is the final one.

bibliographystyleutmthesis-authordate
%bibliographystyleutmthesis-numbering
bibliographyphdrefrences
enddocument

here are the entries in the bibliography file

@ARTICLEabdelhamid2012mac,
 author = Abdelhamid, Neda and Ayesh, Aladdin and Thabtah, Fadi and Ahmadi, Samad and Hadi, Wael,
 title = MAC: A Multiclass Associative Classification Algorithm,
 journal = Journal of Information & Knowledge Management,
 year = 2012,
 volume = 11,
 pages = 1-10,
 number = 02,
 publisher = World Scientific

@CONFERENCEagrawal1994fast,
 author = Agrawal, Rakesh and Srikant, Ramakrishnan and others,
 title = Fast algorithms for mining association rules,
 booktitle = Proc. 20th Int. Conf. Very Large Data Bases, VLDB,
 year = 1994,
 volume = 1215,
 pages = 487--499

@CONFERENCEagrawal1994fast,
 author = Agrawal, Rakesh and Srikant, Ramakrishnan and others,
 title = Fast algorithms for mining association rules,
 booktitle = Proc. 20th Int. Conf. Very Large Data Bases, VLDB,
 year = 1994,
 volume = 1215,
 pages = 487--499

The references are shown in the bibliography but I want to resolve the warning.

This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (MiKTeX 2.9 64-bit)
The top-level auxiliary file: References.aux
The style file: utmthesis-authordate.bst
Database file #1: phdrefrences.bib
You can't pop an empty literal stack for entry agrawal1994fast
while executing---line 1711 of file utmthesis-authordate.bst
You can't pop an empty literal stack for entry ali1997partial
while executing---line 1711 of file utmthesis-authordate.bst
(There were 2 error messages)

The bibliography style needs the month field.
It erroneously calls skip$ instead of pushing an empty string literal in line 538.

The function should be:

FUNCTION format.month

 month empty$
 "" 
 " " month * 
 if$

The call format.month output in line 1208 expects format.month to leave a string on the stack.

So, either

1. fix the bst file, replacing the function as above, or




2. ensure every inproceedings/conference entry has a field month

In any case, you should report this issue, e.g. at the github page.

(Note: it is more common to name the entry type inproceedings rather than conference. Intuitively, I would assume that conference refers to a whole conference, not a single talk. inproceedings is more clear: it refers to one "entity" in the proceedings of the conference.)