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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.