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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 (see 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 https://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.