bibliography not showing latex

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Bibliography in latex with bibtex/biblatex, learn how to create a bibliography with bibtex and biblatex in a few simple steps. create references / citations and autogenerate footnotes., creating a .bib file, using bibtex.

• Autogenerate footnotes with BibLaTeX
• BibTeX Format

BibTeX Styles

• New Post! Export Bibliographic Database (BibTeX) Entries from Online Databases

We have looked at many features of LaTeX so far and learned that many things are automated by LaTeX. There are functions to add a table of contents, lists of tables and figures and also several packages that allow us to generate a bibliography. I will describe how to use bibtex and biblatex (both external programs) to create the bibliography. At first we have to create a .bib file, which contains our bibliographic information.

A .bib file will contain the bibliographic information of our document. I will only give a simple example, since there are many tools to generate the entries automatically. I will not explain the structure of the file itself at this point, since i suggest using a bibtex generator (choose one from google). Our example will contain a single book and look like this:

If you don’t want to use a BibTeX generator or a reference management tool like Citavi (which generates BibTeX files automatically for you), you can find more examples of BibTeX formats here.

After creating the bibtex file, we have to tell LaTeX where to find our bibliographic database. For BibTeX this is not much different from printing the table of contents. We just need the commands \bibliography  which tells LaTeX the location of our .bib file and \bibliographystyle which selects one of various bibliographic styles.

By using this code, we will obtain something like this:

I named my .bib file lesson7a1.bib, note that I did not enter the .bib extension. For the style, I’ve choosen the ieeetr style, which is very common for my subject, but there are many more styles available. Which will change the way our references look like. The ieeetr style will mark citations with successive numbers such as [1] in this example. If I choose the style to apalike instead, i will get the following result:

Most editors will let you select, to run bibtex automatically on compilation. In TeXworks (MiKTeX) for example, this should be selected by default.

If you use a different editor, it can be necessary to execute the bibtex command manually. In a command prompt/shell simply run:

It is necessary to execute the pdflatex command, before the bibtex command, to tell bibtex what literature we cited in our paper. Afterwards the .bib file will be translated into the proper output for out references section. The next two steps merge the reference section with our LaTeX document and then assign successive numbers in the last step.

Autogenerate footnotes in \(\LaTeX\) using BibLaTeX

The abilities of BibTeX are limited to basic styles as depicted in the examples shown above. Sometimes it is necessary to cite all literature in footnotes and maintaining all of them by hand can be a frustrating task. At this point BibLaTeX kicks in and does the work for us. The syntax varies a bit from the first document. We now have to include the biblatex package and use the \autocite and \printbibliography  command. It is crucial to move the \bibliography{lesson7a1} statement to the preamble of our document:

The \autocite command generates the footnotes and we can enter a page number in the brackets \autocite[1]{DUMMY:1} will generate a footnote like this:

For BibLaTeX we have to choose the citation style on package inclusion with:

The backend=bibtex  part makes sure to use BibTeX instead of Biber as our backend, since Biber fails to work in some editors like TeXworks. It took me a while to figure out how to generate footnotes automatically, because the sources I found on the internet, didn’t mention this at all.

BibTeX Formats

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of BibTeX formats, but rather give you an idea of how to cite various sources properly. If you’re interested in an extensive overview of all BibTeX formats, I suggest you to check out the resources on Wikibooks.

Inbook (specific pages)

This is a list of the formats that I have most commonly used. If you think some important format is missing here, please let me know.

Here’s a quick overview of some popular styles to use with BibTeX.

I’m trying to keep this list updated with other commonly used styles. If you’re missing something here, please let me know.

• Generate a bibliography with BibTeX and BibLaTeX
• First define a .bib file using: \bibliography{BIB_FILE_NAME} (do not add .bib)
• For BibTeX put the \bibliography statement in your document , for BibLaTeX in the preamble
• BibTeX  uses the \bibliographystyle command to set the citation style
• BibLaTeX chooses the style as an option like:  \usepackage[backend=bibtex, style=verbose-trad2]{biblatex}
• BibTeX uses the \cite command, while BibLaTeX uses the \autocite command
• The \autocite command takes the page number as an option: \autocite[NUM]{}

Next Lesson: 08 Footnotes

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BibTeX, natbib, biblatex: Managing Citations in LaTeX: Troubleshooting

• LaTeX Bibliography Resources
• Bibliography Packages
• Citation Styles in LaTeX
• Zotero and LaTeX
• Troubleshooting
• Workshop Notes

General Protocols

Using BibTeX, biber, natbib, or biblatex is relatively straightforward, but sometimes, something breaks. Here are some general steps for troubleshooting problems with your bibliography.

• Clear your document cache. Most LaTeX writing programs will offer this as a menu option. In TeXmaker, it is under Tools > Clean. In Overleaf, select "recompile from scratch" under the drop-down menu in the green compile button.
• Ensure that you are running LaTeX, BibTeX or biber, LaTeX, and then PDFLaTeX (or whichever tool you use to render your PDFs) in the proper order. This doesn't matter as much in Overleaf because the tool is very good at understanding what you want to do.
• Check the documentation on CTAN for the citation style you have called or the style file itself, which sometimes contains documentation and package dependency information in the header. Some of them, such as biblatex's APA style, require that you call other packages. You will get errors if you do not include these packages.
• Check the TeX StackExchange web site. It is extremely helpful for seeing different perspectives on a whole host of difficulties. If no one has asked your question, feel free to register and engage with the people there — just make sure that you have documented your error thoroughly.
• Contact me (at the info on the right) with your problem, and we can set up a time to discuss your BibTeX issue.

You can also talk to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Bing, or Bard. Most chatbots are very skilled at understanding what code is supposed to look like. However, they are limited in that their suggestions are sometimes a bit off — they can make assumptions about what you want to do in your document based on the information in your prompt, and you'll need to use trial-and-error to help them understand what you are looking for. If the question is complex, you are better off contacting a person or posting to a forum.

Known Issues with csquotes

Some tools for generating LaTeX .bst files (bibliographic styles), such as the docstrip utility, have known compatibility issues with the package  csquotes . The csquotes package is a robust quotation management tool, with support for multiple languages and advanced quotation elements of interest to those writing formal academic documents. For those writing theses, dissertations, or other formal documents where a robust quotation management package is required, it is an excellent choice.

One problem with many .bst files available online is that they attempt to define something called \enquote within the style. When used without csquotes, this is fine, but csquotes has its own defined variable called \enquote. LaTeX does not appreciate having two variables with the same name, so it will call an error, and the document will refuse to compile.

The error will look like this:

And it is resolved by redefining one of these variables. I recommend redefining the one in the .bst file to something like \enquotebst. This can be done very easily to your .bst file using find/replace. The risk of modifying csquotes is that you are tampering with a built-in package that might be updated and reset every time TeX updates are downloaded. For example, in the ajs.bst file commonly found online for sociologists, the \enquote variable appears in two places:

Replace "enquote" with "enquoteFILENAME" or "enquotebst" wherever it appears in the .bst file. The error will stop if \enquote was your problem. If the error continues, ensure that your .bst file is in the correct directory and that you are only calling the bibliography once.

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LaTeX forum ⇒ BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Bibliography does not appear Topic is solved

Bibliography does not appear.

Post by Davidislm » Wed Apr 03, 2013 9:23 am

Bibliography does not appear   Topic is solved

Post by Stefan Kottwitz » Wed Apr 03, 2013 10:05 am

Re: Bibliography does not appear

Post by Davidislm » Wed Apr 03, 2013 2:06 pm

Return to “BibTeX, biblatex and biber”

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