The TeX FAQ

Frequently Asked Question List for TeX

Bibliographies

Creating a BibTeX bibliography file

A BibTeX bibliography file may reasonably be compared to a small database, the entries in which are references to literature that may be called up by citations in a document.

Each entry in the bibliography has a type and a unique key. The bibliography is read, by BibTeX, using the details specified in a bibliography style. From the style, BibTeX finds what entry types are permissible, what fields each entry type has, and how to format the whole entry.

The type specifies the type of document you’re making reference to; it may run all the way from things like Book and Proceedings (which may even contain other citations of type InBook or InProceedings) through dissertation styles like PhdThesis to otherwise-uncategorisable things such as Misc. The unique key is something you choose yourself: it’s what you use when you want to cite an entry in the file. People commonly create a key that combines the (primary) author’s name and the year of publication, possibly with a marker to distinguish publications in the same year. So, for example, the Dyson, Eddington, Davidson paper about deflection of starlight appears in my experimental bib file as Dyson20.1.

So, noting the rules of the style, you have “simply” to write a bibliography database. Fortunately, there are several tools to help in this endeavour:

FAQ ID: Q-buildbib