Previous: \nocite, Up: thebibliography


8.24.4 Using BibTeX

If you use the BibTeX program by Oren Patashnik (highly recommended if you need a bibliography of more than a couple of titles) to maintain your bibliography, you don't use the thebibliography environment (see thebibliography). Instead, you include the lines

     \bibliographystyle{bibstyle}
     \bibliography{bibfile1,bibfile2}

The \bibliographystyle command does not produce any output of its own. Rather, it defines the style in which the bibliography will be produced: bibstyle refers to a file bibstyle.bst, which defines how your citations will look. The standard style names distributed with BibTeX are:

alpha
Sorted alphabetically. Labels are formed from name of author and year of publication.
plain
Sorted alphabetically. Labels are numeric.
unsrt
Like plain, but entries are in order of citation.
abbrv
Like plain, but more compact labels.

In addition, numerous other BibTeX style files exist tailored to the demands of various publications. See http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/contrib.

The \bibliography command is what actually produces the bibliography. The argument to \bibliography refers to files named bibfile.bib, which should contain your database in BibTeX format. Only the entries referred to via \cite and \nocite will be listed in the bibliography.