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Department of Engineering |
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Bibliographies with LaTeX
LaTeX was designed with technical reports very much in mind. The associated
bibtex program makes citations and bibliographies relatively
painless. With bibtex you can use the same
bibliography database file for various documents. Also it's easy to change
styles, which you'll appreciate when you become aware of the vast diversity
of periodical requirements.
You need to have a bibliography file with an entry for each item. Details on
how to do this are in the next section but put the
following into testbib.bib to get you started.
@BOOK
{KandR,
AUTHOR = "Kernighan, Brian W. and Ritchie, Dennis M.",
TITLE = "{The C Programming Language Second Edition}",
PUBLISHER = "Prentice-Hall, Inc.",
YEAR = 1988
}
The first field (in this case KandR) is the tag used when you \cite the item.
How this citation appears in the text depends on the packages used and the
bibliography style.
The AUTHOR field should be in the following format
Surname1, Forename1 and Surname2, Forename2 and Surname3, Forename3 ...
- this information will be reformatted in the document.
In your main latex document you need \bibliographystyle{plain}
at the top to set the style and \bibliography{testbib} where you
want the bibliography to appear, and to specify the bibtex file. Only cited
items will appear in the bibliography.
As a test, put the following in test.tex
\documentclass{article}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\begin{document}
See \cite{KandR} for details.
\bibliography{testbib}
\end{document}
Initially you have to run latex test, bibtex test,
latex test and latex test
again on your document before everything appears. After that, you only
have to run latex (unless you change the bibliography file).
bibtex offers many types of entries, each with different
optional and compulsory fields - described in the
bibtex handout - so you can use any editor to
create the files. If you have a recent version of emacs you'll
find that new menus appear when you edit *.bib files. These
provide template entries, sorting facilities etc. Alternatives include
- bibview - a dedicated program with more database facilities.
Runs with X windows
- BibTexMng -
a bibtex manager for Windows.
- JabRef
- a Java application (pointed out to me by Ged Ridgway)
Some organisations (e.g. IEEE)
provide bibliographic style files for authors. If you have do to your own
customization, there are various approaches
-
An alternative to the plain style used in the above example is
unsrt which lists references in citation order rather than
author order. If you want multiple citations sorted, use the citesort
package. If you want citations superscripted, use the overcite package.
-
If you find that you need to make more changes than this (for instance,
if you want the citations to mention the author and date), it's time to use the
natbib package (see the
natbib reference sheet for the essentials).
Just change test.tex to the following to try it
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat} % note the change here
\begin{document}
See \cite{KandR} for details.
\bibliography{testbib}
\end{document}
Now it's easy to add features. For instance, to have superscripted, sorted
citations, use
...
\usepackage[super,sort]{natbib}
...
natbib offers variants like \citep, \citet and
gives control over punctuation, vertical space between bibliography items, etc.
- If none of the supplied styles is adequate, then the
custom-bib package can be used by typing latex makebst.tex from the command line to customise your own style - it's self-documenting; just accept the offered defaults if you have doubts.
The bibliography's title can be changed by using
"\renewcommand\refname{New Title}" for articles and
"\renewcommand\bibname{New Title}" for books.
The tocbibind package helps add bibliographies to contents pages.
To have references at the end of each chapter, use
chapterbib or
bibunits.
After \usepackage{chapterbib} each included file
can have \bibliography and \bibliographystyle commands.
bibtex has to be run on each file.
To have a section of References (items cited) and a Bibliography (which
may contain items not cited) in a single-file article you can do the following - add \usepackage{bibunits} to your latex document and create your references in the usual way.
Then add
\renewcommand\refname{Bibliography}
\begin{bibunit}[plain]
\nocite{*}
\putbib[testbib]
\end{bibunit}
to the file (called test.tex say). Then run latex test, bibtex test, bibtex bu1 (and bibtex bu2 if you have 2 bibunits, etc),
latex test and finally latex test.
To have a single bibliography sectioned by chapters, use chapterbib
- see the chapterbib.sty file for details. Here's a short example:
in your main document (called test.tex say), use the information
in test.bib
\documentclass{book}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\usepackage[gather]{chapterbib}
\begin{document}
\include{One}
\include{Two}
\include{Three}
\bibliography{test}
\end{document}
Each included file can be something like this
\chapter{One}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\cite{KP78}
\cite{H90}
\bibliography{test}
Then process as follows
latex test
bibtex One
bibtex Two
bibtex Three
latex test
latex test
If you want multiple bibliographies and you're using natbib, check the
natbib documentation.
To split a bibliography into several categories/subcategories try splitbib
