Overview
Designed for University of Melbourne staff and students on the various methods of reference management within LaTeX documents. The basics of a LaTeX bibliography is explained with reference to more popular editors such as Overleaf
What is LaTeX?
LaTeX is a typesetting markup language that is used to create formatted documents.
- You create a plain text file, with the extension.tex, and mark the text up with commands that are processed to create a formatted document.
- It is widely used by scientists, engineers and other academics because it makes it easy to typeset complex mathematical formulae.
What is BibTex?
You can use BibTeX to automatically generate & format a bibliography in a LaTeX document.
First, you need to create a bibliography database file with the extension .bib containing bibliographic entries.
You can then use the following commands in your LaTeX document:
- \cite{label}
- To insert a citation where label is the label of a bibliographic entry in a .bib file.
- \bibliography{bibfilename}
- To insert a bibliography where bibfilename is the name of a .bib file.
- \bibliographystyle{bstfilename}
- To choose a BibTeX bibliographic style file with the extension .bst.
LaTeX & BibTeX Example
This is an example of a .bib file called BibFile.bib that has just one bibliographic entry for a book:
@Book{gG07, author = "Gratzer, George A.", title = "More Math Into LaTeX", publisher = "Birkhauser", address = "Boston", year = 2007, edition = "4th" }
This is an example of a .tex file that refers to the .bib file:
\documentclass[12pt]{article} \usepackage{amsmath} \title{An Example Document} \author{John Smith} \date{} \begin{document} \maketitle \section{The first section} This is an example of a document formatted using \LaTeX{}. This is an example of a citation \cite{gG07}. Now here is an example of an equation: \begin{align} i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\Psi(r,t) = -\frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\Psi(r,t)+V(r)\Psi(r,t) \end{align} \bibliographystyle{amsplain} \bibliography{BibFile} \end{document}
And a screenshot of a section of the resulting typeset output:
- Example Overleaf v2 projectThe above example as an Overleaf v2 project.
Webinar recordings
Watch these webinar recordings for help getting started.