Citing and referencing using Bibtex

Why should you use Bibtex?

• After entering a bibliographic item you reuse the same entry so Bibtex makes for great efficiency.
• Only one bibliographic file is required (but you can use several).
  A reference need only be entered once in this database (and updated if necessary later) and can then be reused for any subsequent paper, book chapter or book (even if it is for a publication with a completely different bibliographic style).
• The style of the bibliography or reference list is determined by a simple parameter.
• Although the intial setting up, hopefully for your first paper, takes more effort than other LaTeX biblographic methods, there are dramatic savings afterwards and from then on the technique is extremely simple.

To make the best use of Bibtex first compile a Master Bibliography. You can then use this for all future LaTeX documents.

1. Create a database file,say, (Master.bib) that lists the items that you want to reference in Bibtex format.
2. Specify the style and location of the bibliography in your LaTeX document by including in your LateX code the command
   \bibliographystyle{bibstyle}
   where bibstyle is defined below, anywhere in your document and the command
   \bibliography{Master}
   where you want the bibliography/reference list to appear.
3. Run latex and bibtex as described under Compiling below.

Example

Here is the LaTeX code for the text in the library page

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{plain}%Choose a bibliograhpic style
%
Note. This is the Postscript version with plain bibliographic style.
Most of the academic staff in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering have publications in their field of expertise or research. The majority of the publications appear in journals or proceedings of conferences. Articles appearing in journals may be written by a single author~\cite{Meyer2000}. Where there are multiple authors, the citation in the text usually names only the first author, for example Kim Marriott's article on logic programming~\cite{Codishetal2000}. The same fate befalls Henry Wu~\cite{Huetal2000}. Some authors contribute a chapter to edited books~\cite{WallaceandKorb1999}. Others, for example Christine Mingins, jointly publish a book~\cite{Jezequeletal2000}. Damian Conway is a world expert on Perl. As well as having written a book on this topic~\cite{Conway2000}, he has also been the subject of articles~\cite{Johnston2000}.
%
\bibliography{Master}
\end{document}

Example of the Bibliographic Database
Master.bib

Notice that each article has a key (such as Conway2000) which is used to cite the article.

• Bibliographic styles that can be used instead of plain include abbrv, alpha, plain, unsrt and acm for the Association for Computing Machinery. Others are available.
• The ~ before the \cite prevents a line break before the [1].

Compiling the example

1. latex example
2. bibtex example
3. latex example
4. latex example
5. dvips example

Note: As usual in LaTeX you do not need all these repetitions every time and that you only need to run Bibtex if the references change.

If you prefer your output in PDF format replace the last two commands by

pdflatex example

The resulting postscript output looks similar to the Vancouver style in the library page.

(Source code for the Postscript version.)

Here is the resulting PDF output using the ACM style.

(Source code for the PDF version.)