Conference Title - shall abbreviation and year be listed uniformly? I'm just had a look at my citations and they are in an aweful state. Most conference papers that I imported into my citation manager have different styles, e.g.:

IEEEE Conference on Emerging Txxx Bxxx Qxxxxxxx, 2009 (ETBQ 2009)
IEEEE Conference on Old Wxxx Yxxx Sxxxxxxx (OWYS), 2009
IEEEE Conference on Txxx Txxx Xxxxxxxx, 2009, (TTX 2009)
IEEEE Conference on Gold. 2009 (Chicago)


Am I allowed to bring all conferences into the same format?

What format would you recommend? Should I drop abbreviation, year, or place of the conference as it is repeated? I think the year might have to stay because e.g. a coference might be held in Dec. 2009 and the papers are only published in Feb. 2010, hence the 2009 date would be lost. I also like the abbreviation as it helps my to identify the coferences in one glimps.

Second question: Should I add "Proceeding of the" in front of every conference?
There is an important and unfortunate caveat for managing citations that I bring up because this refers to IEEE.  In IEEE, ACM, and many other computer science and electrical engineering venues, it is often the case that there are strict page limits and the citations are counted toward that limit.  This happens mostly with conferences, but sometimes even with journals.

Because of this, I often find it necessary to maintain both a "master" reference database and an ad hoc "abbreviated" copy of the database used for a particular paper.  In the master database, I keep the full everything in all its bibliographic detail to the best of my ability.  In the abbreviated copy, conference and journal names get shortened as necessary to purge the bibliography of widow and orphans
and extract those last few lines necessary to get the text to fit.  It's a nasty, undignified practice, and I consider it the lesser of two evils if it can preserve technical content without decreasing the ability of a reader to locate citations.

The ability to find the citation, though, is sacrosanct.  Authors, title, year (and volume and issue if available), must never be trifled with.  As such, the shortening targets that tend I use, in order, are:


"Proceedings of the..." can always go, as can the location of a conference.
"International Conference on" goes to "Int'l Conf. on" and then vanishes 
Most EE/CS conference have acronyms: an exceedingly well-known conference can be entirely replaced by its acronym.


Thus, for example, "Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China" can ablate all the way down to "IJCAI", saving 1-2 lines in typical IEEE format bibliography.  It's an ugly business, and maybe I shouldn't admit to it out loud on the internet, but it's a useful practice that I still find ethical as long as the spirit of readily locatable citation is preserved.