LaTeX Tips: Top Ten Tips for Bibliographies
All but the first of the tips below apply to the bibtex method of
generating bibliographies.
For more details, and for additional tips,
see the main
Bibliographies Tips
page.
- Mandatory argument to "thebibliography".
The "thebibliography" environment has a mandatory argument,
representing the width of the widest label.
Example:
\begin{thebibliography}{99} .... \end{thebibliography}
.
Leaving out this argument causes an error with the rather vague
error message "Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item".
- Before running bibtex, run the tex file
through latex. The bibtex program needs the "auxiliary" file
(with extension
.aux
) that is produced by latex.
- The bibtex program must be run
on the auxiliary file of the paper, not the bibtex database.
This is a common source of confusion for beginners.
If tex and bibtex files for a paper have the same names, say
paper.tex
and paper.bib
, things are simple:
the command bibtex paper
, where the filename
paper
is specified without extension, will do the right
thing. However, it is important to understand that the file that is
processed by bibtex is not the bibtex file,
paper.bib
, but rather the auxiliary file
paper.aux
that is generated after the first run through
latex. Thus, in the above command the short-hand argument
paper
is expanded to paper.aux
.
This becomes significant if the bibtex database has a name that is different
from the name of the tex file. For example, if the bibtex database
is mybibliography.bib
, the appropriate bibtex command is
bibtex paper
, not bibtex mybibliography
,
since bibtex needs the file paper.aux
, not the (probably
non-existing) file mybibliography.aux
.
- Capitalized words in titles.
Words in titles that are to be capitalized (such as proper names)
must be protected by placing the first (upper case) letter in braces.
Example: On {B}anach spaces
.
Note that this applies only to title fields (title
and
booktitle
). In other fields, such as journal names, no
lower case conversion is done, so there is no need to protect
capitalized words.
- Multiple authors. Separate the names of the authors
by the conjunction "and", without additional punctuation marks.
- Nonstandard author names.
For names of authors
not in the standard "first last" or first middle last"
format, the part representing the last name
has to be explicitly marked by surrounding it with braces
to ensure that the entry gets correctly alphabetized.
Example:
Jose {Dos Santos}
.
- Accented characters.
Accented characters must be surrounded by braces.
Example:
Erd{\H o}s
.
- Overriding the default sort order.
Bibtex normally does a good job in arranging references in the
appropriate order (alphabetically by author, then chronologically);
however, unpublished items that do not have a year listed may get
placed before items by the same author published earlier. To prevent
this and instead have the unpublished work be listed last,
add an "invisible" year entry in the record as follows:
year = "unpublished manuscript\setbox0=\hbox{2003}"
.
Similar tricks allow one to override other undesirable orderings.
- Including references that are not cited in the paper.
Bibtex builds the bibliography from the references that are actually
cited in the paper. Including references without corresponding
citations is generally a bad idea, but it may be warranted in
special situations.
To include a reference that is not cited in the paper, but which
has a record in the bibtex database, add the command
\nocite{xxx}
at the end of the paper, just before the
bibliography; here "xxx" is the key for the paper to be cited.
The command \nocite{*}
causes all items in the database
to be included in the references, regardless of whether or not
they are cited
in the paper.
- Printing out a bibtex database.
To print out all records in
a bibtex database, say
mybibliography.bib
,
create and compile a dummy tex file containing the
following commands:
\documentstyle{amsart}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{amsplain}
\bibliography{mybibliography}
\end{document}
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Last modified: Thu 09 Jul 2009 02:24:23 PM CDT
A.J. Hildebrand