Tutorial 5: Bibliography and Citations [Warming up]

Citationss are references to books, articles, web pages, or other published items with sufficient details to identify them uniquely. LaTeX makes citing references quite simple, easy and organized that freshmen can have no more excuses for plagiarism. There are two ways for texing the bibliography, either using "thebibliography" environment or using bibtex.

'Manual' citations: using "thebibliography"

Despite the fact that some people believe this method is easier than using bibtex, it's not. Nevertheless, here we provide an overview of using thebibliography environment, and shortly we provide justifications for prefering the bibtex over this one. Using thebibliography environment is quite simple as shown below. The {10} is the maximum number of items that will come in the list, and for each item the \bibitem command is used providing a unique keyword to be used later on for reference.

 	\begin{thebibliography}{10}

	\bibitem{latexGuide} Kopka Helmut, W. Daly Patrick, 
	\emph{Guide to \LaTeX}, $4^{th}$ Edition.
	Available at \texttt{http://www.amazon.com}.

	\bibitem{latexMath} Graetzer George, \emph{Math Into \LaTeX},
	Birkhäuser Boston; 3 edition (June 22, 2000).

	\end{thebibliography}

The next step you would like to accomplish is actually citing one of the references on your list. This can be done using the \cite command and providing the corresponding keyword that has already been assigned to the bibitem.

 	''Luckily, many text editors include the ability to switch 
	end-of-line codes; some even do so automatically''\cite{latexMath}

Then why BiBTeX ?!

You might think that thebibliography is the best you have ever dreamed of, actually there's much more that BiBTeX can offer you:

1.  You can write your bibliography in one separate file and reuse it with every LaTeX document. Most probably you have almost the same resources for mutual papers, so why rewrite the bibliography each and every time ?

2.  Manually formatting the list of references is really bad practice, you should follow one consistent citation format (like the MLA format) for all of your references. This is quite easily achieved using BiBTeX which we will explore right on the next page. You might want to use the default formatting, or if you are submitting a paper to a conference, it is as easy as including the style sheet.

3. BiBTeX is not only to be used with LaTeX, but can also be used to produce HTML output, using bib2xhtml or with a variety of other applications that provide a UI for editing your .bib (Bibliographic Information File) like Jabref

4. Included too many sources on your list, but did not use them all? This is not a problem with BiBTeX because it only shows the resources which have been referenced using the \cite command, in addition to other resources which have not been explicitly referenced but have been enforced to display using the \nocite command.

On the next couple of pages, we will provide some examples for using BiBTeX. If thebibliography is enough for you and you do not want to go on with the rest of the tutorial, here is thebibliography.tex and thebibliography.pdf