Bibtex Overview and Essential Tips
BibTeX was created by Oren Patashnik as an addition to LaTeX to solve the problem of bibliographies. In large academic projects like journal articles or books, publishers (or your advisor here at 新澳资料) want your bibliography to follow a series of extremely exact rules governing everything from the placement of commas to the spelling of editor. BibTeX combines your database of sources with a style file enforcing the rules of the publishers or your advisor. For more about styles, check out our BibTeX Style page.
An excellent .
A Short Explanation of the Process
It is possible to make your bibliography from scratch, and to manually put in all your citations, but why ignore the hard work that many people have done on your behalf developing a system that will organize and format your bibliography, manage your citations and format everything in the style that you choose? These tools are BibTeX, BibDesk, and JabRef.
BibTeX is a processing engine that takes a database developed by you and applies it to a document in which you refer to entries in that database. BibDesk and JabRef are programs which can make the database that BibTeX looks for. Either of these programs will manage your BibTeX database, creating the .bib file that will be used to make your bibliography.
In short what happens is this: You write a file (ie, foo.tex) in which you use the command \cite{DoyleOwl:2003}. When you LaTeX this file, the LaTeX processing engine sees this and knows that another processing engine will come through and fix this in the future, so it writes this in the foo. aux file to wait for another engine to take care of it. You have using your bibliography management program, or on your own, created a file called foo. bib. This file is a database that includes information (such as author, title, year published) on every source that you cited in foo.tex. When you run BibTeX, it combs through the foo.aux file to find everything that LaTeX couldn't handle, and interprets those files on its own. BibTeX does three things:
- It interpets the \cite commands using foo.bib
- It finds which entries in foo.bib have actually been used.
- Using the information it gathered in step 2, it writes the bibliography.
All this BibTeX puts in a file called foo. bbl. Now when you run LaTeX, it fills in the bibliography and matches citations to data, and when you run it again it has filled in all the citations and the bibliography correctly and neatly. This is summarized in the image below: