Latex Problem with Using Bibliography

Underscores cause quite a problem in latex. There are places where one should never put _ and there are places where one can. When there is an _ in title of a bibliographic entry, a strange error like this is produced (discovered this after a lot of permutation and combination of debugging):

! LaTeX Error: Lonely \item--perhaps a missing list environment.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.

Type H for immediate help.

...

l.46 \bibitem{mcconnell04}

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