Using BibTeX (LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual (November 2018))

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#### 8.24.4 Using BibTeX

As described in `thebibliography` (see thebibliography), a sophisticated approach to managing bibliographies is provided by the BibTeX program. This is only an introduction; see the full documentation on CTAN.

With BibTeX, you don’t use `thebibliography` (see thebibliography). Instead, include these lines.

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

The bibstyle refers to a file `bibstyle.bst`, which defines how your citations will look. The standard bibstyle’s distributed with BibTeX are:

`alpha`

  Labels are formed from name of author and year of publication. The bibliographic items are sorted alphabetically.

`plain`

  Labels are integers. Sort the bibliographic items alphabetically.

`unsrt`

  Like `plain`, but entries are in order of citation.

`abbrv`

  Like `plain`, but more compact labels.

Many, many other BibTeX style files exist, tailored to the demands of various publications. See CTAN’s listing http://mirror.ctan.org/biblio/bibtex/contrib.

The `\bibliography` command is what actually produces the bibliography. Its argument is a comma-separated list, referring to files named `bibfile1.bib`, `bibfile2.bib`, … These contain your database in BibTeX format. This shows a typical couple of entries in that format.

    @book{texbook,
      title     = {The {{\TeX}}book},
      author    = {D.E. Knuth},
      isbn      = {0201134489},
      series    = {Computers \& typesetting},
      year      = {1983},
      publisher = {Addison-Wesley}
    }
    @book{sexbook,
        author    = {W.H. Masters and V.E. Johnson},
        title     = {Human Sexual Response},
        year      = {1966},
        publisher = {Bantam Books}
    }

Only the bibliographic entries referred to via `\cite` and `\nocite` will be listed in the document’s bibliography. Thus you can keep all your sources together in one file, or a small number of files, and rely on BibTeX to include in this document only those that you used.

Unofficial LaTeX2e reference manual