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BIBTeX Basics

To include BIBTeX citations in your LaTeX document, you'll need to do several things.

  1. Make a BIBTeX file with the sources you'll be using. This can be one massive file with many sources, or can be broken into many smaller files. Either work, so do what is best for you, but you may want to keep one master .bib file as a catch-all. Save a blank file as .bib in Emacs and the Emacs top bar will help you create new entries more easily (and it's already pretty easy).
  2. Have the two commands to call the BIBTeX bibliography in your document. These commands are in the table below.
    CommandsAnd What They Do
    \bibliographystyle{aip}This command tells LaTeX which bibliography style to use. Here, AIP is the American Institute of Physics; other options include Modern Language Association, Chicago, and many others.
    \bibliography{videogames,comics,interface,theory} The bibliography command tells LaTeX which BIBTeX bibliographies to use. For instance, the command above would be using four BIBTeX files to draw the sources from; each of these four would be .bib files.
  3. Use the \cite command and the short name for citations inside of your document when doing cites so that all of them will be controlled by BIBTeX.
  4. To make this all work properly:
    1. Run LaTeX once with the command latex filename.tex.
    2. Run BIBTeX once with the command bibtex filebasename (filebase name with no extension)
    3. Run LaTeX again to get the BIBTeX information.
    4. Run LaTeX once more to make sure there are no gaps.
  5. Finally, if you want to change the heading for the reference list, do so.
Samples (saved as .text or .txt for Web Viewing)
Tex FilesBIBTeX .bib FilesPDF
test.texbibtex_testfour.texttest.pdf
with_bib1.texttheorybib.textwith_bib1.pdf

A great short discussion of how BIBTeX works: http://cmtw.harvard.edu/Documentation/TeX/Bibtex/Example.html

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