essay bibliography latex

LaTeX-Tutorial.com

Bibliography in latex with bibtex/biblatex, learn how to create a bibliography with bibtex and biblatex in a few simple steps. create references / citations and autogenerate footnotes., creating a .bib file, using bibtex.

• Autogenerate footnotes with BibLaTeX
• BibTeX Format

BibTeX Styles

• New Post! Export Bibliographic Database (BibTeX) Entries from Online Databases

We have looked at many features of LaTeX so far and learned that many things are automated by LaTeX. There are functions to add a table of contents, lists of tables and figures and also several packages that allow us to generate a bibliography. I will describe how to use bibtex and biblatex (both external programs) to create the bibliography. At first we have to create a .bib file, which contains our bibliographic information.

A .bib file will contain the bibliographic information of our document. I will only give a simple example, since there are many tools to generate the entries automatically. I will not explain the structure of the file itself at this point, since i suggest using a bibtex generator (choose one from google). Our example will contain a single book and look like this:

If you don’t want to use a BibTeX generator or a reference management tool like Citavi (which generates BibTeX files automatically for you), you can find more examples of BibTeX formats here.

After creating the bibtex file, we have to tell LaTeX where to find our bibliographic database. For BibTeX this is not much different from printing the table of contents. We just need the commands \bibliography  which tells LaTeX the location of our .bib file and \bibliographystyle which selects one of various bibliographic styles.

By using this code, we will obtain something like this:

I named my .bib file lesson7a1.bib, note that I did not enter the .bib extension. For the style, I’ve choosen the ieeetr style, which is very common for my subject, but there are many more styles available. Which will change the way our references look like. The ieeetr style will mark citations with successive numbers such as [1] in this example. If I choose the style to apalike instead, i will get the following result:

Most editors will let you select, to run bibtex automatically on compilation. In TeXworks (MiKTeX) for example, this should be selected by default.

If you use a different editor, it can be necessary to execute the bibtex command manually. In a command prompt/shell simply run:

It is necessary to execute the pdflatex command, before the bibtex command, to tell bibtex what literature we cited in our paper. Afterwards the .bib file will be translated into the proper output for out references section. The next two steps merge the reference section with our LaTeX document and then assign successive numbers in the last step.

Autogenerate footnotes in \(\LaTeX\) using BibLaTeX

The abilities of BibTeX are limited to basic styles as depicted in the examples shown above. Sometimes it is necessary to cite all literature in footnotes and maintaining all of them by hand can be a frustrating task. At this point BibLaTeX kicks in and does the work for us. The syntax varies a bit from the first document. We now have to include the biblatex package and use the \autocite and \printbibliography  command. It is crucial to move the \bibliography{lesson7a1} statement to the preamble of our document:

The \autocite command generates the footnotes and we can enter a page number in the brackets \autocite[1]{DUMMY:1} will generate a footnote like this:

For BibLaTeX we have to choose the citation style on package inclusion with:

The backend=bibtex  part makes sure to use BibTeX instead of Biber as our backend, since Biber fails to work in some editors like TeXworks. It took me a while to figure out how to generate footnotes automatically, because the sources I found on the internet, didn’t mention this at all.

BibTeX Formats

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of BibTeX formats, but rather give you an idea of how to cite various sources properly. If you’re interested in an extensive overview of all BibTeX formats, I suggest you to check out the resources on Wikibooks.

Inbook (specific pages)

This is a list of the formats that I have most commonly used. If you think some important format is missing here, please let me know.

Here’s a quick overview of some popular styles to use with BibTeX.

I’m trying to keep this list updated with other commonly used styles. If you’re missing something here, please let me know.

• Generate a bibliography with BibTeX and BibLaTeX
• First define a .bib file using: \bibliography{BIB_FILE_NAME} (do not add .bib)
• For BibTeX put the \bibliography statement in your document , for BibLaTeX in the preamble
• BibTeX  uses the \bibliographystyle command to set the citation style
• BibLaTeX chooses the style as an option like:  \usepackage[backend=bibtex, style=verbose-trad2]{biblatex}
• BibTeX uses the \cite command, while BibLaTeX uses the \autocite command
• The \autocite command takes the page number as an option: \autocite[NUM]{}

Next Lesson: 08 Footnotes

LaTeX/Bibliography Management

For any academic/research writing, incorporating references into a document is an important task. Fortunately, LaTeX has a variety of features that make dealing with references much simpler, including built-in support for citing references. However, a much more powerful and flexible solution is achieved thanks to an auxiliary tool called BibTeX (which comes bundled as standard with LaTeX). Recently, BibTeX has been succeeded among many users by BibLaTeX , a tool configurable within LaTeX syntax.

BibTeX provides for the storage of all references in a bibliographic information file with the file extension .bib , a kind of flat-file database. (BibLaTeX uses this same file format but with more and different bibliographic entry types and field types than BibTeX.) This database can be referenced in any LaTeX document, and citations made to any record that is contained within the file. This is often more convenient than embedding them at the end of every document written; a centralized bibliography source can be linked to as many documents as desired (write once, read many!). Of course, bibliographies can be split over as many files as one wishes, so there can be a file containing sources concerning topic A ( a.bib ) and another concerning topic B ( b.bib ). When writing about topic AB, both of these files can be linked into the document (perhaps in addition to sources ab.bib specific to topic AB).

• 1 Embedded system
• 2.1 Referring more specifically
• 2.2 Multiple citations
• 2.3 Bibliography styles
• 2.4 No cite
• 2.5.1 Customization
• 3.1 Authors
• 3.2 Standard templates
• 3.3 Non-standard templates
• 3.4 Preserving case of letters
• 3.5 A few additional examples
• 3.6 Getting current LaTeX document to use your .bib file
• 3.7 Why won't LaTeX generate any output?
• 3.8 Including URLs in bibliography
• 3.9 Customizing bibliography appearance
• 3.10 Localizing bibliography appearance
• 3.11 Showing unused items
• 3.12 Getting bibliographic data
• 3.13 Helpful tools
• 3.14 Summary
• 4.1 Using tocbibind
• 4.2.1 As unnumbered item
• 4.2.2 As numbered item
• 5.1 Entry and field types in .bib files
• 5.2.1 Printing separate bibliographies
• 5.2.2 Example with prefix keys, subheadings and table of contents
• 6.1 Using multibib
• 6.2 Using bibtopic
• 7 Notes and references

Embedded system

If you are writing only one or two documents and aren't planning on writing more on the same subject for a long time, you might not want to waste time creating a database of references you are never going to use. In this case you should consider using the basic and simple bibliography support that is embedded within LaTeX.

LaTeX provides an environment called thebibliography that you have to use where you want the bibliography; that usually means at the very end of your document, just before the \end{document} command. Here is a practical example:

OK, so what is going on here? The first thing to notice is the establishment of the environment. thebibliography is a keyword that tells LaTeX to recognize everything between the begin and end tags as data for the bibliography. The mandatory argument, which I supplied after the begin statement, is telling LaTeX how wide the item label will be when printed. Note however, that the number itself is not the parameter, but the number of digits is. Therefore, I am effectively telling LaTeX that I will only need reference labels of one character in length, which ultimately means no more than nine references in total. If you want more than nine, then input any two-digit number, such as '56', which allows up to 99 references.

Next is the actual reference entry itself. This is prefixed with the \bibitem{ cite_key } command. The cite_key should be a unique identifier for that particular reference, and is often some sort of mnemonic consisting of any sequence of letters, numbers and punctuation symbols (although not a comma). I often use the surname of the first author, followed by the last two digits of the year (hence lamport94 ). If that author has produced more than one reference for a given year, then I add letters after, 'a', 'b', etc. But, you should do whatever works for you. Everything after the key is the reference itself. You need to type it as you want it to be presented. I have put the different parts of the reference, such as author, title, etc., on different lines for readability. These linebreaks are ignored by LaTeX. The \textit{} command formats the title properly in italics.

To actually cite a given document is very easy. Go to the point where you want the citation to appear, and use the following: \cite{ cite_key } , where the cite_key is that of the bibitem you wish to cite. When LaTeX processes the document, the citation will be cross-referenced with the bibitems and replaced with the appropriate number citation. The advantage here, once again, is that LaTeX looks after the numbering for you. If it were totally manual, then adding or removing a reference would be a real chore, as you would have to re-number all the citations by hand.

Referring more specifically

If you want to refer to a certain page, figure or theorem in a text book, you can use the arguments to the \cite command:

The argument, "p. 215", will show up inside the same brackets. Note the tilde in [p.~215] , which replaces the end-of-sentence spacing with a non-breakable inter-word space. This non-breakable inter-word space is inserted because the end-of-sentence spacing would be too wide, and "p." should not be separated from the page number. The code \cite[215]{citation01} will produce the same result — in this case p.~ in front of the page number will be added automatically; but it will not be added for \cite[Cor.~2.5]{citation01} .

Multiple citations

When a sequence of multiple citations is needed, you should use a single \cite{} command. The citations are then separated by commas. Here's an example:

The result will then be shown as citations inside the same brackets, depending on the citation style.

Bibliography styles

There are several different ways to format lists of bibliographic references and the citations to them in the text. These are called citation styles , and consist of two parts: the format of the abbreviated citation (i.e. the marker that is inserted into the text to identify the entry in the list of references) and the format of the corresponding entry in the list of references, which includes full bibliographic details.

Abbreviated citations can be of two main types: numbered or textual. Numbered citations (also known as the Vancouver referencing system ) are numbered consecutively in order of appearance in the text, and consist in Arabic numerals in parentheses (1) , square brackets [1] , superscript 1 , or a combination thereof [1] . Textual citations (also known as the Harvard referencing system ) use the author surname and (usually) the year as the abbreviated form of the citation, which is normally fully (Smith 2014) or partially enclosed in parenthesis, as in Smith (2014) . The latter form allows the citation to be integrated in the sentence it supports.

Below you can see three of the styles available with LaTeX:

Here are some more often used styles:

However, keep in mind that you will need to use the natbib package to use most of these.

If you only want a reference to appear in the bibliography, but not where it is referenced in the main text, then the \nocite{} command can be used, for example:

A special version of the command, \nocite{*} , includes all entries from the database, whether they are referenced in the document or not.

Using the standard LaTeX bibliography support, you will see that each reference is numbered and each citation corresponds to the numbers. The numeric style of citation is quite common in scientific writing. In other disciplines, the author-year style, e.g., (Roberts, 2003), such as Harvard is preferred. The natbib package is one possible way to get such an output. In fact, it can supersede LaTeX's own citation commands, as Natbib allows the user to easily switch between Harvard or numeric.

The first job is to add the following to your preamble in order to get LaTeX to use the Natbib package:

An example of useful options is:

Also, you need to change the bibliography style file to be used, so edit the appropriate line at the bottom of the file so that it reads: \bibliographystyle{plainnat} . Once done, it is basically a matter of altering the existing \cite commands to display the type of citation you want.

Customization

The main commands simply add a t for 'textual' or p for 'parenthesized', to the basic \cite command. You will also notice how Natbib by default will compress references with three or more authors to the more concise 1st surname et al version. By adding an asterisk (*), you can override this default and list all authors associated with that citation. There are some other specialized commands that Natbib supports, listed in the table here. Keep in mind that for instance abbrvnat does not support \citet* and will automatically choose between all authors and et al..

The final area that I wish to cover about Natbib is customizing its citation style. There is a command called \bibpunct that can be used to override the defaults and change certain settings. For example, I have put the following in the preamble:

The command requires six mandatory parameters.

• The symbol for the opening bracket.
• The symbol for the closing bracket.
• The symbol that appears between multiple citations.
• n - numerical style.
• s - numerical superscript style.
• any other letter - author-year style.
• The punctuation to appear between the author and the year (in parenthetical case only).
• The punctuation used between years, in multiple citations when there is a common author. e.g., (Chomsky 1956, 1957). If you want an extra space, then you need {,~} .

Some of the options controlled by \bibpunct are also accessible by passing options to the natbib package when it is loaded. These options also allow some other aspect of the bibliography to be controlled, and can be seen in the table (right).

So as you can see, this package is quite flexible, especially as you can easily switch between different citation styles by changing a single parameter. Do have a look at the Natbib manual , it's a short document and you can learn even more about how to use it.

I have previously introduced the idea of embedding references at the end of the document, and then using the \cite command to cite them within the text. In this tutorial, I want to do a little better than this method, as it's not as flexible as it could be. I will concentrate on using BibTeX .

A BibTeX database is stored as a .bib file. It is a plain text file, and so can be viewed and edited easily. The structure of the file is also quite simple. An example of a BibTeX entry:

Each entry begins with the declaration of the reference type, in the form of @ type . BibTeX knows of practically all types you can think of, common ones are: book , article , and for papers presented at conferences, there is inproceedings . In this example, I have referred to an article within a journal.

After the type, you must have a left curly brace ' { ' to signify the beginning of the reference attributes. The first one follows immediately after the brace, which is the citation key , or the BibTeX key . This key must be unique for all entries in your bibliography. It is this identifier that you will use within your document to cross-reference it to this entry. It is up to you as to how you wish to label each reference, but there is a loose standard in which you use the author's surname, followed by the year of publication. This is the scheme that I use in this tutorial.

Next, it should be clear that what follows are the relevant fields and data for that particular reference. The field names on the left are BibTeX keywords . They are followed by an equals sign (=) where the value for that field is then placed. BibTeX expects you to explicitly label the beginning and end of each value. I personally use quotation marks ("), however, you also have the option of using curly braces ('{', '}'). But as you will soon see, curly braces have other roles, within attributes, so I prefer not to use them for this job as they can get more confusing. A notable exception is when you want to use characters with umlauts (ü, ö, etc), since their notation is in the format \"{o} , and the quotation mark will close the one opening the field, causing an error in the parsing of the reference. Using \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} in the preamble to the .tex source file can get round this, as the accented characters can just be stored in the .bib file without any need for special markup. This allows a consistent format to be kept throughout the .bib file, avoiding the need to use braces when there are umlauts to consider.

Remember that each attribute must be followed by a comma to delimit one from another. You do not need to add a comma to the last attribute, since the closing brace will tell BibTeX that there are no more attributes for this entry, although you won't get an error if you do.

It can take a while to learn what the reference types are, and what fields each type has available (and which ones are required or optional, etc). So, look at this entry type reference and also this field reference for descriptions of all the fields. It may be worth bookmarking or printing these pages so that they are easily at hand when you need them. Much of the information contained therein is repeated in the following table for your convenience.

+ Required fields, o Optional fields *1 (Clarification needed) *2 (Clarification needed)

BibTeX can be quite clever with names of authors. It can accept names in forename surname or surname, forename . I personally use the former, but remember that the order you input them (or any data within an entry for that matter) is customizable and so you can get BibTeX to manipulate the input and then output it however you like. If you use the forename surname method, then you must be careful with a few special names, where there are compound surnames, for example "John von Neumann". In this form, BibTeX assumes that the last word is the surname, and everything before is the forename, plus any middle names. You must therefore manually tell BibTeX to keep the 'von' and 'Neumann' together. This is achieved easily using curly braces. So the final result would be "John {von Neumann}". This is easily avoided with the surname, forename , since you have a comma to separate the surname from the forename.

Secondly, there is the issue of how to tell BibTeX when a reference has more than one author. This is very simply done by putting the keyword and in between every author. As we can see from another example:

This book has three authors, and each is separated as described. Of course, when BibTeX processes and outputs this, there will only be an 'and' between the penultimate and last authors, but within the .bib file, it needs the and s so that it can keep track of the individual authors.

Standard templates

Standard templates that can be directly copied and filled in. Optional entries are marked in the core by a ? prefix. Note that the % sign used in LaTeX for commenting lines does not work in BibTeX and creates invalid field name. In BibTeX, valid but unknown field names and names outside of an entry are ignored, leading to a popular commenting method. <--Be careful if you copy the following templates, the % sign is not valid to comment out lines in bibtex files. If you want to comment out a line, you have to put it outside the entry.-->

• Required fields: author, title, journal, year.
• Optional fields: volume, number, pages, month, note.
• Required fields: author/editor, title, publisher, year.
• Optional fields: volume/number, series, address, edition, month, note.
• Required fields: title.
• Optional fields: author, howpublished, address, month, year, note.
• Required fields: author, title, booktitle, year.
• Optional fields: editor, volume/number, series, pages, address, month, organization, publisher, note.
• Required fields: author/editor, title, chapter and/or pages, publisher, year.
• Optional fields: volume/number, series, type, address, edition, month, note.
• Required fields: author, title, booktitle, publisher, year.
• Optional fields: editor, volume/number, series, type, chapter, pages, address, edition, month, note.
• Optional fields: author, organization, address, edition, month, year, note.
• Required fields: author, title, school, year.
• Optional fields: type (eg. "diploma thesis"), address, month, note.
• Required fields: none
• Optional fields: author, title, howpublished, month, year, note.
• Required fields: author, title, year, school.
• Optional fields: address, month, keywords, note.
• Required fields: title, year.
• Optional fields: editor, volume/number, series, address, month, organization, publisher, note.
• Required fields: author, title, institution, year.
• Optional fields: type, number, address, month, note.
• Required fields: author, title, note.
• Optional fields: month, year.

Non-standard templates

Preserving case of letters.

In the event that BibTeX has been set by the chosen style not to preserve all capitalization within titles, problems can occur, especially if you are referring to proper nouns, or acronyms. To tell BibTeX to keep them, use the good old curly braces around the letter in question, (or letters, if it's an acronym) and all will be well! It is even possible that lower-case letters may need to be preserved - for example if a chemical formula is used in a style that sets a title in all caps or small caps, or if "pH" is to be used in a style that capitalises all first letters.

However, avoid putting the whole title in curly braces, as it will look odd if a different capitalization format is used:

For convenience though, many people simply put double curly braces, which may help when writing scientific articles for different magazines, conferences with different BibTex styles that do sometimes keep and sometimes not keep the capital letters:

As an alternative, try other BibTex styles or modify the existing. The approach of putting only relevant text in curly brackets is the most feasible if using a template under the control of a publisher, such as for journal submissions. Using curly braces around single letters is also to be avoided if possible, as it may mess up the kerning, especially with biblatex, [ 1 ] so the first step should generally be to enclose single words in braces.

A few additional examples

Below you will find a few additional examples of bibliography entries. The first one covers the case of multiple authors in the Surname, Firstname format, and the second one deals with the incollection case.

If you have to cite a website you can use @misc, for example:

The note field comes in handy if you need to add unstructured information, for example that the corresponding issue of the journal has yet to appear:

Getting current LaTeX document to use your .bib file

At the end of your LaTeX file (that is, after the content, but before \end{document} ), you need to place the following commands:

Bibliography styles are files recognized by BibTeX that tell it how to format the information stored in the .bib file when processed for output. And so the first command listed above is declaring which style file to use. The style file in this instance is plain.bst (which comes as standard with BibTeX). You do not need to add the .bst extension when using this command, as it is assumed. Despite its name, the plain style does a pretty good job (look at the output of this tutorial to see what I mean).

The second command is the one that actually specifies the .bib file you wish to use. The ones I created for this tutorial were called sample1.bib , sample2.bib , . . ., samplen.bib , but once again, you don't include the file extension. At the moment, the .bib file is in the same directory as the LaTeX document too. However, if your .bib file was elsewhere (which makes sense if you intend to maintain a centralized database of references for all your research), you need to specify the path as well, e.g \bibliography{/some/where/sample} or \bibliography{../sample1} (if the .bib file is in the parent directory of the .tex document that calls it).

Now that LaTeX and BibTeX know where to look for the appropriate files, actually citing the references is fairly trivial. The \cite{ ref_key } is the command you need, making sure that the ref_key corresponds exactly to one of the entries in the .bib file. If you wish to cite more than one reference at the same time, do the following: \cite{ ref_key1 , ref_key2 , ..., ref_keyN } .

Why won't LaTeX generate any output?

The addition of BibTeX adds extra complexity for the processing of the source to the desired output. This is largely hidden from the user, but because of all the complexity of the referencing of citations from your source LaTeX file to the database entries in another file, you actually need multiple passes to accomplish the task. This means you have to run LaTeX a number of times. Each pass will perform a particular task until it has managed to resolve all the citation references. Here's what you need to type (into command line):

• latex latex_source_code.tex
• bibtex latex_source_code.aux

(Extensions are optional, if you put them note that the bibtex command takes the AUX file as input.)

After the first LaTeX run, you will see errors such as:

The next step is to run bibtex on that same LaTeX source (or more precisely the corresponding AUX file, however not on the actual .bib file) to then define all the references within that document. You should see output like the following:

The third step, which is invoking LaTeX for the second time will see more errors like " LaTeX Warning: Label(s) may have changed. Rerun to get cross-references right. ". Don't be alarmed, it's almost complete. As you can guess, all you have to do is follow its instructions, and run LaTeX for the third time, and the document will be output as expected, without further problems.

If you want a pdf output instead of a dvi output you can use pdflatex instead of latex as follows:

• pdflatex latex_source_code.tex

Note that if you are editing your source in vim and attempt to use command mode and the current file shortcut (%) to process the document like this:

• :! pdflatex %
• :! bibtex %

You will get an error similar to this:

• I couldn't open file name 'current_file.tex.aux'

It appears that the file extension is included by default when the current file command (%) is executed. To process your document from within vim, you must explicitly name the file without the file extension for bibtex to work, as is shown below:

• :! bibtex %:r (without file extension, it looks for the AUX file as mentioned above)

Another option exists if you are running Unix/Linux or any other platform where you have make . Then you can simply create a Makefile and use vim's make command or use make in shell. The Makefile would then look like this:

Frequently occuring errors are:

• Bibtex is irritated by spaces in the bibliography file's name. Spaces in file names are not allowed with BibTeX, other limitations such as a maximal path length of 40 characters are valid too. Solution: Copy the bib file into your folder or rename folders to names without spaces.
• Empty bibliography: Did you cite something in the document (search for \cite or similar words)? Otherwise, LaTeX will not generate a bibliography in the PDF. Solutions: Use \nocite{*} to list all entries in the bibliography, without regard to whether they are cited or not. Or simply: Cite something.
• BibTeX keeps complaining over an entry with quotation marks despite the syntax looks correct? It may be that the quotation marks are similar looking, but wrong characters. (" vs. ''). Solution: Try to exchange the quotation marks with their correct counterparts.

Including URLs in bibliography

As you can see, there is no field for URLs. One possibility is to include Internet addresses in howpublished field of @misc or note field of @techreport , @article , @book :

howpublished = "\url{http://www.example.com}"

Note the usage of \url command to ensure proper appearance of URLs .

Another way is to use special field url and make bibliography style recognise it.

url = "http://www.example.com"

You need to use \usepackage{url} in the first case or \usepackage{hyperref} in the second case.

Styles provided by Natbib (see below) handle this field, other styles can be modified using urlbst program. Modifications of three standard styles (plain, abbrv and alpha) are provided with urlbst.

If you need more help about URLs in bibliography, visit FAQ of UK List of TeX .

Customizing bibliography appearance

One of the main advantages of BibTeX, especially for people who write many research papers, is the ability to customize your bibliography to suit the requirements of a given publication. You will notice how different publications tend to have their own style of formatting references, to which authors must adhere if they want their manuscripts published. In fact, established journals and conference organizers often will have created their own bibliography style (.bst file) for those users of BibTeX, to do all the hard work for you.

It can achieve this because of the nature of the .bib database, where all the information about your references is stored in a structured format, but nothing about style. This is a common theme in LaTeX in general, where it tries as much as possible to keep content and presentation separate.

A bibliography style file ( .bst ) will tell LaTeX how to format each attribute, what order to put them in, what punctuation to use in between particular attributes etc. Unfortunately, creating such a style by hand is not a trivial task. Which is why Makebst (also known as custom-bib ) is the tool we need.

Makebst can be used to automatically generate a .bst file based on your needs. It is very simple, and actually asks you a series of questions about your preferences. Once complete, it will then output the appropriate style file for you to use.

It should be installed with the LaTeX distribution (otherwise, you can download it ) and it's very simple to initiate. At the command line, type:

LaTeX will find the relevant file and the questioning process will begin. You will have to answer quite a few (although, note that the default answers are pretty sensible), which means it would be impractical to go through an example in this tutorial. However, it is fairly straight-forward. And if you require further guidance, then there is a comprehensive manual available. I'd recommend experimenting with it and seeing what the results are when applied to a LaTeX document.

If you are using a custom built .bst file, it is important that LaTeX can find it! So, make sure it's in the same directory as the LaTeX source file, unless you are using one of the standard style files (such as plain or plainnat , that come bundled with LaTeX - these will be automatically found in the directories that they are installed. Also, make sure the name of the .bst file you want to use is reflected in the \bibliographystyle{style} command (but don't include the .bst extension!).

Localizing bibliography appearance

When writing documents in languages other than English, you may find it desirable to adapt the appearance of your bibliography to the document language. This concerns words such as editors , and , or in as well as a proper typographic layout. The babelbib package can be used here. For example, to layout the bibliography in German, add the following to the header:

Alternatively, you can layout each bibliography entry according to the language of the cited document:

The language of an entry is specified as an additional field in the BibTeX entry:

For babelbib to take effect, a bibliography style supported by it - one of babplain , babplai3 , babalpha , babunsrt , bababbrv , and bababbr3 - must be used:

Showing unused items

Usually LaTeX only displays the entries which are referred to with \cite . It's possible to make uncited entries visible:

Getting bibliographic data

Many online databases provide bibliographic data in BibTeX-Format, making it easy to build your own database. For example, Google Scholar offers the option to return properly formatted output, which can also be turned on in the settings page.

One should be alert to the fact that bibliographic databases are frequently the product of several generations of automatic processing, and so the resulting BibTex code is prone to a variety of minor errors, especially in older entries.

Helpful tools

• BibDesk BibDesk is a bibliographic reference manager for Mac OS X. It features a very usable user interface and provides a number of features like smart folders based on keywords and live tex display.
• BibSonomy — A free social bookmark and publication management system based on BibTeX.
• BibTeXSearch BibTeXSearch is a free searchable BibTeX database spanning millions of academic records.
• Bibtex Editor - An online BibTeX entry generator and bibliography management system. Possible to import and export Bibtex files.
• Bibwiki Bibwiki is a Specialpage for MediaWiki to manage BibTeX bibliographies. It offers a straightforward way to import and export bibliographic records.
• cb2Bib The cb2Bib is a tool for rapidly extracting unformatted, or unstandardized bibliographic references from email alerts, journal Web pages, and PDF files.
• Citavi Commercial software (with size-limited free demo version) which even searches libraries for citations and keeps all your knowledge in a database. Export of the database to all kinds of formats is possible. Works together with MS Word and Open Office Writer. Moreover plug ins for browsers and Acrobat Reader exist to automatically include references to your project.
• DokuWiki DokuWiki is a Bibtext plugin that allows for the inclusion of bibtex formatted citations in DokuWiki pages and displays them in APA format. Note: This Plugins is vulnerable to an XSS attack -> http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:bibtex
• Ebib — a BibTeX database manager for Emacs , well resolved and never more than a few keystrokes away.
• JabRef is a Java program (under the GPL license) which lets you search many bibliographic databases such as Medline, Citeseer, IEEEXplore and arXiv and feed and manage your BibTeX local databases with your selected articles. Based on BiBTeX, JabRef can export in many other output formats such as html, MS Word or EndNote.
• KBib Another BibTeX editor for KDE. It has similar capabilities, and slightly different UI. Features include BibTeX reference generation from PDF files, plain text, DOI, arXiv & PubMed IDs. Web queries to Google Scholar, PubMer, arXiv and a number of other services are also supported.
• KBibTeX KBibTeX is a BibTeX editor for KDE to edit bibliographies used with LaTeX. Features include comfortable input masks, starting web queries (e. g. Google or PubMed) and exporting to PDF, PostScript, RTF and XML/HTML. As KBibTeX is using KDE's KParts technology, KBibTeX can be embedded into Kile or Konqueror.
• Literatur-Generator is a German-language online tool for creating a bibliography (Bibtex, Endnote, Din 1505, ...).
• Mendeley Mendeley is cost-free academic software for managing PDFs which can manage a bibliography in Open Office and read BibTeX.
• Qiqqa Qiqqa is a free research manager that has built-in support for automatically associating BibTeX records with your PDFs and a 'BibTeX Sniffer' for helping you semi-automatically find BibTeX records.
• Referencer Referencer is a Gnome application to organise documents or references, and ultimately generate a BibTeX bibliography file.
• Synapsen — Hypertextual Card Index / Reference Manager with special support for BiBTeX / biblatex, written in Java.
• Zotero Zotero is a free and open reference manager working as a standalone application, capable of importing and exporting bib files. Zotero has browser plugins for Chrome and Firefox.

Although it can take a little time to get to grips with BibTeX, in the long term, it's an efficient way to handle your references. It's not uncommon to find .bib files on websites that people compile as a list of their own publications, or a survey of relevant works within a given topic, etc. Or in those huge, online bibliography databases, you often find BibTeX versions of publications, so it's a quick cut-and-paste into your own .bib file, and then no more hassle!

Having all your references in one place can be a big advantage. And having them in a structured form, that allows customizable output is another one. There are a variety of free utilities that can load your .bib files, and allow you to view them in a more efficient manner, as well as sort them and check for errors.

Bibliography in the table of contents

If you are writing a book or report , you'll likely insert your bibliography using something like:

Or, if you are using BibTeX, your references will be saved in a .bib file, and your TeX document will include the bibliography by these commands:

Both of these examples will create a chapter-like (or section-like) output showing all your references. But even though the resulting “References” looks like a chapter or section, it will not be handled quite the same: it will not appear in the Table of Contents.

Using tocbibind

The most comfortable way of adding your bibliography to the table of contents is to use the dedicated package tocbibind that works with many standard document classes. Simply include this code in the preamble of your document:

This will include the Bibliography in the Table of Contents without numbering. If you want to have proper numbering, include the following code in the preamble:

The tocbibind package can also handle including the List of Figures, List of Tables and the Table of Contents itself in the Table of Contents. It has many options for numbering, document structure etc. to fit almost any scenario. See the tocbibind CTAN page for detailed documentation.

Other methods

As unnumbered item.

If you want your bibliography to be in the table of contents, just add the following two lines just before the thebibliography environment:

(OR \addcontentsline { toc }{ section }{ Bibliography } if you're writing an article )

The first line just terminates the current paragraph and page. If you are writing a book , use \cleardoublepage to match the style used. The second line will add a line in the Table of Contents (first option, toc ), it will be like the ones created by chapters (second option, chapter ), and the third argument will be printed on the corresponding line in the Table of Contents; here Bibliography was chosen because it's the same text the thebibliography environment will automatically write when you use it, but you are free to write whatever you like. If you are using a separate bib file, add these lines between \bibliographystyle and \bibliography .

If you use hyperref package, you should also use the \phantomsection command to enable hyperlinking from the table of contents to bibliography.

This trick is particularly useful when you have to insert the bibliography in the Table of Contents, but it can work for anything. When LaTeX finds the code above, it will record the info as described and the current page number, inserting a new line in the Contents page.

As numbered item

If you instead want bibliography to be numbered section or chapter, you'll likely use this way:

Another even easier solution is to use \section inside of the \renewcommand block:

You may wish to use \renewcommand* { \refname }{ \vspace* { -1em }} followed by \vspace* { -1em } to counteract the extra space the blank \refname inserts.

If you are using BibTeX, the \bibliography command, and the book or report class, you will need to redefine \bibname instead of \refname like so.

As we said before, biblatex is widely considered the successor of BibTeX. Intended as a full replacement for BibTeX, it is more configurable in its output and provides a multitude of new styles (for output) and fields (for the database) that can be used in a document. For now, refer to its comprehensive documentation on CTAN .

Entry and field types in .bib files

The following table shows most field types. Some field types are lists, either lists of person names , others are literal lists . A date can either be given in parts or full, some keys are necessary, page references are provided as ranges and certain special fields contain verbatim code. There are many kinds of titles .

Some entry types are hard to distinguish and are treated the same by standard styles:

• @article is the same as hypothetic * @inperiodical and therefore encompasses existing @suppperiodical
• @inbook = @bookinbook = @suppbook
• @collection = @reference
• @mvcollection = @mvreference
• @incollection = @suppcollection = @inreference
• @online = @electronic = @www
• @report = @techreport
• @thesis = @mastersthesis = @phdthesis

Some field types are defined, but the documentation does not say which entry types they can be used with. This is either because they depend on another field being set to be useful or they can always be used in a user-defined manner, but will never be used in standard styles:

• abstract , annotation
• entrysubtype
• origdate , origlocation , origpublisher
• origtitle , reprinttitle , indextitle
• pagination , bookpagination
• shortauthor , shorteditor , shorthand , shorthandintro , shortjournal , shortseries shorttitle

The only field that is always mandatory, is title . All entry types also require either date or year and they specify which of author and editor they expect or whether they can use both. Some field types can optionally be used with any entry type:

• addendum , note

All physical (print) entry types share further optional field types:

• eprint , eprintclass , eprinttype

Multimedia entry types

• @performance

and legal entry types

• @commentary
• @jurisdiction
• @legislation

are defined, but not yet supported (well).

The entry types @bibnote , @set and @xdata are special.

Printing bibliography

Presuming we have defined our references in a file called references.bib, we add this to biblatex by adding the following to the preamble:

Print the bibliography with this macro (usually at the end of the document body):

Printing separate bibliographies

We want to separate the bibliography into papers, books and others

If the bib entries are located in multiple files we can add them like this:

We can also filter on other fields, such as entrysubtype. If we define our online resources like this:

we filter with \printbibliography [title={Online resources}, subtype=inet]

Example with prefix keys, subheadings and table of contents

As the numbering of the bibliographies are independent, it can be useful to also separate the bibliographies using prefixnumbers such as a, b and c. In addition we add a main heading for the bibliographies and add that to the table of contents.

To make Hyperref links point to the correct bibliography section, we also add \phantomsection before printing each bibliography

To add each of the bibliographies to the table of contents as sub-sections to the main Bibliography, replace heading=subbibliography with heading=subbibintoc .

Multiple bibliographies

Using multibib.

This package is for multiple Bibliographies for different sections in your work. For example, you can generate a bibliography for each chapter. You can find information about the package on CTAN [ 2 ]

Using bibtopic

The bibtopic-Package [ 3 ] is created to split the citations among more files, so that you can divide the bibliography into more parts. It generates a separate aux file for each bibliography section, so you will have to run bibtex on each of those (see the package documentation for more details).

Notes and references

• ↑ The biblatex manual
• ↑ http://ctan.org/pkg/multibib
• ↑ http://ctan.org/pkg/bibtopic

This page uses material from Andy Roberts' Getting to grips with LaTeX with permission from the author.

• Pages using deprecated enclose attributes
• Outdated pages

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Referencing, Citing, and Structuring Bibliographies

• Referencing Styles
• EndNote Basic
• Using Zotero with LaTeX
• Using Mendeley with LaTeX

What is Natbib?

The natbib package allows more flexibility in terms of citing and referencing styles, including Harvard style. Please see this video for more information:

My references are not appearing right - why?

Much time and effort can be saved by automatically generating BibTeX files through bulk export of multiple references either direct from databases or from reference management software. This automatic process may cause some issues and require you to tidy up the BibTeX files.

Here are some suggestions to help with this:

• LaTeX special characters (e.g. $, %, &, \,) present in a BibTeX file can create problems during typesetting. To avoid this, all these characters should be prefixed with the ‘\’ character. Use a text editor such as Notepad or TeXworks to Find and Replace e.g. replace $ with \$
• The BibTeX file is likely to contain extra fields of information not required for the actual reference. This information may pull through into the reference e.g. Notes field. It is recommended to remove this information from the BibTeX file
• Retaining capitalization. Some bibliography styles strip out capitalization in fields such as the title field; this can be a problem if you want to preserve e.g. acronyms. To preserve capitalization, edit the BibTeX file and enclose the specific text (whole not partial words) in curly brackets:

e.g. title={Study of incompressible {MHD} flow in a circular pipe with transverse magnetic field using a spectral/finite element solver},

Thanks to Imperial College's guide for this information.

Citing and referencing in LaTex - using BibTeX

You can manage your references and bibliography in LaTex using the BibTex system. BibTex allows you to automatically generate and format a bibliography in a LaTeX document. You can do this by storing them in separate BibTeX database files (.bib extension). Advantages to doing this include:

• Once stored in a BibTeX file, a reference can be re-used in future documents (you may choose to maintain one master or a series of BibTeX files)
• Many databases and reference management software allows automatic export of reference details as BibTeX files

You can then use the following commands in your LaTeX document:

• To insert a citation where  label  is the label of a bibliographic entry in a  .bib  file.
• To insert a bibliography where  bibfilename  is the name of a  .bib  file.
• To choose a BibTeX bibliographic style file with the extension  .bst .

There is a wealth of guides on how to do this available on the web, including LaTeX's own guide on bibliography management here .

This is also a really helpful guide on how BibTex works:  https://www.latex-tutorial.com/tutorials/bibtex/  

• LaTeX/Bibliography Management Wiki Book
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How to break lines in LaTeX Bibliography

I have a very long url in my bibliography that it's not broken so appears outside margins. How could I fixed id? some breakline stuff?

• line-breaks
• bibliography

You should use the url package here , which will automatically allow linebreaks.

You mention in your comment that you are already using the package. Have a look at section 5.2, then, and allow extra linebreaks.

• Well, I am using it.. :/ I use .bib files. Thanks! –  legami Commented Sep 30, 2010 at 7:08
• Where I should add breaklines? I tried before and after begin document. Thanks :) –  legami Commented Sep 30, 2010 at 7:21

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LaTeX forum ⇒ Page Layout ⇒ Headers for the Bibliography

Headers for the bibliography.

Post by jakob » Fri Dec 09, 2011 5:51 pm

Recommended reading 2024:

Post by Jojoba86 » Fri Dec 09, 2011 8:09 pm

Post by Stefan Kottwitz » Fri Dec 09, 2011 9:24 pm

Re: Headers for the Bibliography

Post by Jojoba86 » Sun Dec 11, 2011 6:41 pm

Post by jakob » Mon Dec 12, 2011 12:27 pm

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Scribbr Citation Generator

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• Introduction
• Finding sources

Evaluating sources

• Integrating sources

Citing sources

Tools and resources, a quick guide to working with sources.

Working with sources is an important skill that you’ll need throughout your academic career.

It includes knowing how to find relevant sources, assessing their authority and credibility, and understanding how to integrate sources into your work with proper referencing.

This quick guide will help you get started!

Finding relevant sources

Sources commonly used in academic writing include academic journals, scholarly books, websites, newspapers, and encyclopedias. There are three main places to look for such sources:

• Research databases: Databases can be general or subject-specific. To get started, check out this list of databases by academic discipline . Another good starting point is Google Scholar .
• Your institution’s library: Use your library’s database to narrow down your search using keywords to find relevant articles, books, and newspapers matching your topic.
• Other online resources: Consult popular online sources like websites, blogs, or Wikipedia to find background information. Be sure to carefully evaluate the credibility of those online sources.

When using academic databases or search engines, you can use Boolean operators to refine your results.

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In academic writing, your sources should be credible, up to date, and relevant to your research topic. Useful approaches to evaluating sources include the CRAAP test and lateral reading.

CRAAP is an abbreviation that reminds you of a set of questions to ask yourself when evaluating information.

• Currency: Does the source reflect recent research?
• Relevance: Is the source related to your research topic?
• Authority: Is it a respected publication? Is the author an expert in their field?
• Accuracy: Does the source support its arguments and conclusions with evidence?
• Purpose: What is the author’s intention?

Lateral reading

Lateral reading means comparing your source to other sources. This allows you to:

• Verify evidence
• Contextualize information
• Find potential weaknesses

If a source is using methods or drawing conclusions that are incompatible with other research in its field, it may not be reliable.

Integrating sources into your work

Once you have found information that you want to include in your paper, signal phrases can help you to introduce it. Here are a few examples:

Following the signal phrase, you can choose to quote, paraphrase or summarize the source.

• Quoting : This means including the exact words of another source in your paper. The quoted text must be enclosed in quotation marks or (for longer quotes) presented as a block quote . Quote a source when the meaning is difficult to convey in different words or when you want to analyze the language itself.
• Paraphrasing : This means putting another person’s ideas into your own words. It allows you to integrate sources more smoothly into your text, maintaining a consistent voice. It also shows that you have understood the meaning of the source.
• Summarizing : This means giving an overview of the essential points of a source. Summaries should be much shorter than the original text. You should describe the key points in your own words and not quote from the original text.

Whenever you quote, paraphrase, or summarize a source, you must include a citation crediting the original author.

Citing your sources is important because it:

• Allows you to avoid plagiarism
• Establishes the credentials of your sources
• Backs up your arguments with evidence
• Allows your reader to verify the legitimacy of your conclusions

The most common citation styles are APA, MLA, and Chicago style. Each citation style has specific rules for formatting citations.

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How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 1): Basic Structure

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Author: Josh Cassidy (August 2013)

This five-part series of articles uses a combination of video and textual descriptions to teach the basics of writing a thesis using LaTeX. These tutorials were first published on the original ShareLateX blog site during August 2013; consequently, today's editor interface (Overleaf) has changed considerably due to the development of ShareLaTeX and the subsequent merger of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf. However, much of the content is still relevant and teaches you some basic LaTeX—skills and expertise that will apply across all platforms.

Your thesis could be the longest and most complicated document you'll ever write, which is why it's such a good idea to use L a T e X instead of a common word processor. L a T e X makes tasks that are difficult and awkward in word processors, far simpler.

When writing something like a thesis its worth splitting up the document into multiple .tex files. It's also wise to organise the project using folders; therefore, we'll create two new folders, one for all the images used in the project and one for all the .tex files making up the main body of the thesis.

• 1 The preamble
• 2 The frontmatter
• 3 The main body
• 4 The endmatter
• 5 All articles in this series

The preamble

In this example, the main.tex file is the root document and is the .tex file that will draw the whole document together. The first thing we need to choose is a document class. The article class isn't designed for writing long documents (such as a thesis) so we'll choose the report class, but we could also choose the book class.

We can also change the font size by adding square brackets into the \documentclass command and specifying the size—we'll choose 12pt. Let's also prepare the document for images by loading the graphicx package. We'll also need to tell L a T e X where to look for the images using the \graphicspath command, as we're storing them in a separate folder.

The start of our preamble now looks like this:

Now we can finish off the preamble by filling in the title, author and date information. To create the simplest title page we can add the thesis title, institution name and institution logo all into the \title command; for example:

This isn't the best way to alter the title page so we'll look at more elaborate ways of customising title pages later on in the series, but this will suffice for now.

This is what the \maketitle command now produces for us:

The frontmatter

After the title page we need to add in an abstract, dedication, declaration and acknowledgements section. We can add each of these in on separate pages using unnumbered chapters. To do this we use the \chapter command and add an asterisk. After these sections we'll add a table of contents using the \tableofcontents command:

The main body

Now for the main body of the document. In this example we will add-in five chapters, one of which will be an introduction and another will be a conclusion. However, instead of just composing these chapters in the main .tex file, we'll create a separate .tex file for each chapter in the chapters folder. We can then fill in these chapters with text remembering to split them up into sections and subsections.

Then to add these chapters into the document, we use the \input command in the root document. Remember to add in chapters/ before the file name so that L a T e X knows where to find it.

The endmatter

We will now add in an appendix at the end of the document. To do this we use the \appendix command to tell L a T e X that what follows are appendices. Again We'll write the appendix in a separate file and then input it.

If we now compile the document, all our chapters will be added to the document and the table of contents will be automatically generated.

Now we have a basic structure for a thesis set up. In the next post I will show you how to change the page layout and add headers.

All articles in this series

• Part 1: Basic Structure ;
• Part 2: Page Layout ;
• Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables ;
• Part 4: Bibliographies with BibLaTeX ;
• Part 5: Customising Your Title Page and Abstract .
• Documentation Home
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes

Overleaf guides

• Creating a document in Overleaf
• Uploading a project
• Copying a project
• Creating a project from a template
• Using the Overleaf project menu
• Including images in Overleaf
• Exporting your work from Overleaf
• Working offline in Overleaf
• Using Track Changes in Overleaf
• Using bibliographies in Overleaf
• Sharing your work with others
• Using the History feature
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An essay is a document written from the author’s point of view to convey a personal opinion. Essays often tie together multiple sources of information to support the central argument that the author is making. Typically structured in paragraphs without headings, essays are a very common method of academic assessment used in schools and universities.

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How do you cite a picture (using biblatex)?

For the project I am working on, I am inserting a couple of pictures that I have to cite. What would be the best way to do that? I am thinking of either putting the citation right below the pictures graphic, or perhaps only citing the picture at the end of the document. (Maybe using \listoffigures ?)

How do I cite the source for a certain image?

• 1 What do you mean precisely by "cite a picture"? Do you mean refer to it in the text, in which case you can use figure , \label and \ref , or cite the source of the picture, in which you may just add \caption{... From \cite{...}.} . –  user121799 Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 19:23
• @marmot I thnik the OP want to cite it in bibtex or biblatex that means that he/she want to find out what entry is appropriate to give the information needed in reference.. ie, @article , or simmilar entry. The question is realated to this: tex.stackexchange.com/q/159446/120578 and have been answered... Possible duplicate –  koleygr Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 19:49
• list of figures will show the title of the figure in a list... If the rights of the picture are not yours and you have to respect some rules (like citing everything external) use a citation (and may be a note or a footnote in its caption) –  koleygr Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 19:53
• Sorry, to precise my question: I mean I want to give the source of a certain image. How would you do that? –  Diclofenac_ Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 20:12
• Please see the linked question (related above in my comment) –  koleygr Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 20:38

There are several ways you could do this. The most straightforward way in my view would be to simply \cite the source in the \caption . I'd also use the optional argument to avoid the citation being repeated unnecessarily in the \listoffigures .

Do keep in mind that certain licences may require you to show more than just a citation label next to the work (CC by-sa may require the name of the author as desired by the author, the title of the work and a link to the licence text), so double- (and triple-)check the licence conditions.

Have a look at other publications in your field and how they normally handle citations of images. Maybe they include the citations in a list of figures, maybe not.

• Thanks! That's awesome, excactly what I was looking for. –  Diclofenac_ Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 21:11
• But why are you using \parencite and not \cite? Also, the biblatex-examples.bib includes your reference in this example right? –  Diclofenac_ Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 21:11
• 1 @AntonNeundorfer I used \parencite purely for aesthetic reasons in this case. If I had written "A duck, picture adapted from " I would probably have used \cite and not \parencite . There is a lot of leeway as to how a citation like this could look like, so there are going to be many, many variations of a common theme. Just pick something you like or have a look at examples in your field. If you still feel unsure ask your advisor. –  moewe Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 21:16
• 1 Yes, biblatex-examples.bib includes sigfridsson and many more example entries. I use that file because it should be available on all machines where biblatex is installed and it allows me to save on the typing. –  moewe Commented Sep 22, 2018 at 21:17

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