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Choosing a BibTeX Style

• How to Choose a Specific Style
• The Seven Standard Styles
• Styles Recommended by аÄ×ÊÁÏ
• NatBib Standard Styles
  • Citation Commands Within NatBib
    
• Biblatex-Chicago Style
• Styles Available Through CTAN
  • Discipline Specific Listings of BibTeX Journal Styles

The great feature of BibTeX is that it takes a standardized database of books, articles, and other bibliographic entries and puts it in a customized format. A BibTeX style can change how a work is cited and how the bibliography is formatted. For more about using BibTeX than is described here, read our BibTeX documentation.

How to Use a Specific Style

1. Choose your BibTeX style from the list below. Place it in the same folder as your LaTeX document.
2. Change the \bibliographystyle line of your LaTeX document to reflect the style you chose. Remember to remove the file extension. For example, if you wanted to use the American Anthropologist style, \bibliographystyle{ filename} would become \bibliographystyle{humannat}.
3. Many BibTeX styles require the inclusion of a package at the top of the document. The comments about a style will tell you exactly how to include its package. To learn more about your specific style, open up the .bst in your LaTeX editor or read the readme file, if available.
4. Anytime you want to cite a document, type \cite[ pagenumber]{ citekey}. The square brackets and page number are optional. Some BibTeX styles use non-standard citations. Such styles include citation directions within the .bst itself or an included readme file.
5. You will need to typeset your document four times, first LaTeX, BibTeX, LaTeX, and then LaTeX again. Your bibliography will now appear in the style of your choice and your citations will be correctly formatted. If question marks appear where citations should, that means you need to LaTeX your document once more. If the citations are entirely missing, you have likely forgotten to BibTeX your document.

The Seven Standard Styles

Every computer with LaTeX comes with the following seven standard styles. While they work, we recommend the natbib interpretations below. NatBib is a citation package that standardizes citation commands across many different bibliography styles, so you can switch from using plain.bst to acm.bst without having to change your in-text citations.

plain.bst
acm.bst
ieeetr.bst
alpha.bst
abbrv.bst
siam.bst

Styles Recommended by аÄ×ÊÁÏ

The following two styles were created or modified by аÄ×ÊÁÏ to match the following style manuals as closely as possible. Right-click (Control-Click on a Mac) on the linked name to download the style you want.

APA Style (American Psychology Association)
This is a custom style created by Ben Salzberg to duplicate the APA style as closely as possible. Make sure to include natbib as a package or it won't work. The following line should appear in the preamble: \usepackage{natbib}.
Modern Language Associate Style (MLA)
This is a custom style created by Ben Salzberg to duplicate the Modern Language Associate style manual (6th Edition) as closely as possible. Make sure to include natbib as a package or it won't work. The following line should appear in the preamble: \usepackage{natbib}. MLA asks for citations of the form (LastName PageNumber), which is unsupported by Natbib's citation styles. We have asked Dr. Patrick Daly to provide support for these type of parenthetical citations in his next revision of natbib. In the meantime, citations of the following form will provide the correct citation: (\citeauthor*{citekey} pagenumber)

Natbib Standard Styles

plainnat.bst
abbrvnat.bst
unsrtnat.bst (Items in bibliography sorted in order cited)

Citation Commands Within Natbib

Author Name Styles look like this:
Numerical Styles look like this:

For additional modifications not covered above, put out by a physical science professor in France.

 - This reference sheet includes instructions on how to change (Jones 1990, 341) to (Jones 1990: 341) [or (Jones, 1990: 341) to (Jones 1990: 341)] using the \setcitestyle command

You will see that your urls are formatted in typewritter font. If you want to change the font of your urls, add the command \urlstyle{same} to your preamble to make them the same font as the body of your paper. 

Biblatex-Chicago Style

To use biblatex-Chicago, you need to change the backend from "bibtex" to "biber." To do this, pull up the preferences window (TeXShop/Preferences... or "⌘,"). Go to the "Engine" tab and change the entry in the BibTeX Engine field to "biber." This does require a somewhat new-ish version of tex, so if it's not working and you have an old version, you may need to download a new one.

Chicago A (footnotes)

To use Chicago style citations, comment out or remove the following line from the preamble:
\usepackage{natbib}

To use Chicago A (footnote style citations), add these lines to the preamble (where "thesis" should be changed to the title of your .bib file):
\usepackage{biblatex-chicago}
\bibliography{thesis}

Explore the  on CTAN to find customizations.

Styles Available at CTAN.org

CTAN.org is the official LaTeX archive containing both the official LaTeX packages and items contributed by LaTeX users. Many of these BibTeX styles have either been created by journal editors or publishers for their authors or by users creating packages to fulfill a personal need. One problem with the user-contributed styles is that they may not match the official style they claim to implement exactly. However, the journal-specific styles will exactly match the journal's house style, as they were designed by the journals. Therefore, we recommend testing any non-journal style by using it with a large BibTeX database and compare the resulting bibliography to the official style.

Discipline Specific Listings of BibTeX Journal Styles

• Art
• Anthropology
  • Human Nature (humannat.bst)
  • American Anthropologist (humannat.bst)
  • Behavior and Brain Sciences (bbs.bst)
• Biology
  • American Journal of Human Genetics (ajhg.bst)
  • American Medical Association Journals