How does bibtex work

Choose a style for your citations and bibliography You need to decide how you want citations to appear in your document and how you want the references formatted in the bibliography. If that's what you want, and you are satisfied with the format of the bibliography that those styles produce, you're done. If you want your citations to take the form "see Arrow and Hahn ", or you want to tinker with the format of the items in the bibliography, then you need to either find or create a suitable BibTeX style file.

If you search for "bibtex style files" on the web, you'll find pages that list style files and show you the output they produce. However, none of these pages makes it easy to choose a style. The styles mentioned in the next section might work for you; or you can create your own see the final section. Create a LaTeX file with references to your bibliography database Your LaTeX file needs to include a reference to a label in your BibTeX file whenever you want to cite an item in the file a reference to the bibliography style file you want to use, which determines how the references you cite are formatted in the bibliography of your document and possibly a LaTeX style file associated with the bibliography style a LaTeX command to generate the bibliography at the point in your document where you want it to appear.

Example using te. This file is available on this page which has instructions on where to put the file once you get it. The lines related to BibTeX are highlighed. It requires the LaTeX style file natbib. You probably have this file already assuming you have some implementation of TeX on your computer. If you don't, you can get it on this CTAN page. Duncombe Rae for pointing out this simple way of generating a possessive citation. The list of references will look like this: Aliprantis, Charalambos D.

Border , Infinite Dimensional Analysis. Springer, Berlin. Arrow, Kenneth J. Maskin, Eric S. Example using apacite. The list of references differs more significantly from the list produced by te. Precisely, the list of references produced by apacite. Berlin: Springer. Toggle navigation. Package Natbib Reference sheet for natbib usage. What is BibTex? BibTeX stands for a file format - with file extension of. As an external, flat-file database, this BibTex file can be initially created and stored within the Zotero or EndNote software program; Then in order to be used in conjunction with a LaTeX.

But pdflatex writes information about the bibliography style and. It notes the. The production of the. When pdflatex is run again, it now sees that a main. So it inserts the contents of main.

As you may have noticed earlier, a. The cite key is the first piece of information given within these braces, and every field in the entry must be separated by a comma :. As a general rule, every bibliography entry should have an author , year and title field, no matter what the type is.

Individual author names are separated by and. So these are correct:. So take extra care if you are copying author names from a paper or from a web page. Alternatively, you can use the Lastname, Firstname format; some users find that clearer and more readable:.

Just make sure that you save it with a.