W3cubDocs

thebibliography

Synopsis:

\begin{thebibliography}{widest-label}
  \bibitem[label]{cite_key}
  ...
\end{thebibliography}

Produce a bibliography or reference list. There are two ways to produce bibliographic lists. This environment is suitable when you have only a few references and can maintain the list by hand. See Using BibTeX, for a more sophisticated approach.

This shows the environment with two entries.

This work is based on \cite{latexdps}.
Together they are \cite{latexdps, texbook}.
  ...
\begin{thebibliography}{9}
\bibitem{latexdps} 
  Leslie Lamport. 
  \textit{\LaTeX{}: a document preparation system}. 
  Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1993.
\bibitem{texbook} 
  Donald Ervin Knuth. 
  \textit{The \TeX book}. 
  Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1983.
\end{thebibliography}

This styles the first reference as ‘[1] Leslie ...’, and so that ... based on \cite{latexdps} produces the matching ‘... based on [1]’. The second \cite produces ‘[1, 2]’. You must compile the document twice to resolve these references.

The mandatory argument widest-label is text that, when typeset, is as wide as the widest item label produced by the \bibitem commands. The tradition is to use 9 for bibliographies with less than 10 references, 99 for ones with less than 100, etc.

The bibliographic list is headed by a title such as ‘Bibliography’. To change it there are two cases. In the book and report classes, where the top level sectioning is \chapter and the default title is ‘Bibliography’, that title is in the macro \bibname. For article, where the class’s top level sectioning is \section and the default is ‘References’, the title is in macro \refname. Change it by redefining the command, as with \renewcommand{\refname}{Cited references}, after \begin{document}.

Language support packages such as babel will automatically redefine \refname or \bibname to fit the selected language.

See list, for the list layout control parameters.

• \bibitem		Specify a bibliography item.
• \cite		Refer to a bibliography item.
• \nocite		Include an item in the bibliography.
• Using BibTeX		Automatic generation of bibliographies.