how to add references in thesis in latex

• Introduction to BibTex
• Cite References in LaTex
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BibTex and LaTex: Cite References in LaTex

How to cite references in latex.

Insert the command below to where you want to cite in your LaTex document:

    \cite{BibTexKey}

If you want to create a bibliography of all references, use this command:

    \nocite{*}

How to Create Bibliography in LaTex

The following two commands are used to create bibliography/reference list:

\bibliographystyle{StyleType}

\bibliography{BibTexFileName}

The built-in bibliography styles in LaTex include:

• plain: references listed in alphabetical order and labeled numerically
• unsrt: same as plain except references appear in order of citation
• alpha: same as plain except labeled by entry
• abbrv: same as plain except use abbreviations for first names and journal names
• acm: ACM style
• ieeetr: IEEE style

How to Typeset a LaTex Document

Once you finish writing and citing in Latex, you need to run the following four commands to generate PDF file with bibliography:

Watch the video  on the right to find out how to cite, create bibliography, and typeset LaTex file in TexStudio.

A Sample LaTex File with Citations

In this simple LaTex document, five BibTex entries are cited. The bibliography style used is "plain", and the BibTex entries are from the database "Mybibtex".

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\title{About JabRef} \author{Author Name}

JabRef is an open source reference management software for BibTex \cite{BESIIICollaboration2014}. It has graphic interface, which makes it easy to use \cite{Apalkov2013,Libby2014}. This is why we choose it as our preferred reference management software for BibTex\cite{Silveira2014}. We will explain the features in details in this section \cite{Uematsu2015}.

\bibliographystyle{plain} \bibliography{Mybibtex}

\end{document}

Change Bibliography Style in LaTex

Sometimes, you need to change your bibliography styles in LaTex. This can be completed by changing the style name in the command:

\bibliographystyle{AnotherStyleType}

The video below gives more details on how to change a bibliography style in LaTex. Click the Full Screen button to enlarge the video.

Video: How to Typeset LaTex Document

This video shows you how to cite, create bibliography, and typeset LaTex file in TexStudio. Click the Full Screen button to enlarge the video.

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LaTeX-Tutorial.com

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

Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Home

• Using Templates on Overleaf
• Reference Managers and Overleaf
• Adding Tables, Images, and Graphs

Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Managing References

BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format. Some reference management tools can generate BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

LaTeX on Wikibooks has a Bibliography Management page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX  here

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How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the Overleaf Gallery .

You can upload your own thesis template to the Overleaf Gallery if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files or you may find your university's thesis template already in the Overleaf Gallery.

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos  if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

Add Institutional Library contact info here.

Contact Overleaf   or email [email protected]

5-part Guide on How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX

5-part LaTeX Thesis Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure corresponding  video

Part 2: Page Layout corresponding  video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables   corresponding video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex corresponding video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract corresponding video

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• Last Updated: May 18, 2021 1:57 PM
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• Basic remarks
• Bitmap fonts
• Page layout

Bibliography

• Footnote citing

Tips on Writing a Thesis in LaTeX

A typical scientific document contains a number of references, and this leads to the problem of organizing and presentation of the references in the document. The problem can be subdivided into several parts: store of the reference information, later retrieval of this information while preparing the document, and presentation (formatting) of the reference information in the document and in the bibliography according to a particular format.

A widely-used approach to deal with references in LaTeX documents is to employ BibTeX reference management software. In BibTeX reference information is stored in format-independent plain text file(s) (usually with .bib extension), which can be modified with almost any text editor. Such a text file contains BibTeX entries , and each entry, formed by several text lines, has

• unique ID or key , needed to identify and refer to the particular entry, for instance Author2001 ;
• entry type , which can be article , book , thesis , etc.;
• entry fields (such as year , publisher , journal , etc.), corresponding to the particular type.

Here is an example of the article type entry from the .bib file I used while typesetting thesis:

The command \bibliography { reference_list } placed before \begin { document } is used to specify a plain text input file ( reference_list.bib here) containing information on references.

References can be "cited" during editing the LaTeX document using, for example, \cite { key } command, and later at the document compilation step LaTeX input files must be processed with LaTeX and BibTeX .

The most popular approaches to indicate a reference appearing in the text can be classified as "numeric" and "author–year". The former uses sequential number of a reference in the document

while "author–year" is based on the extended reference information and may appear like this:

Each indication has particular advantages and drawbacks. For example, numeric is more compact (i.e., require less space in a text line), and a group of references can be "compressed" into a range in the case they have sequential numbering (i.e., [1,2,3,5] will be shown as [1–3,5]). On the other hand, author–year indication shows more information on the cited document (typically, first one or two author names, and a year of a publication), but requires more space compared to the numeric one. The space consumed by reference may become important if your document has high density of references (and you care about in-line space "wasted" by references :).

In my thesis I have decided to use "numeric" indication, but contrary to the example above reference numbers appear in the text as a footnote: reference number by itself has script size ,

and each number has associated script-sized text at the bottom of the page (where the reference appeared) containing extended information on the cited reference:

This citation scheme improves in-line space saving compared to the plain numeric indication due to the reduced size of numbers, and at the same time allows the reader to see what exactly was cited without looking in the bibliography (which is typically located at the end of a document or chapter). The drawback of the footnote citation scheme follows from the space consumed at the bottom of the page: if there are too many citations on the page, footnote text will occupy a lot of space. For example:

To create citations in my thesis, I employed the biblatex package, which is one of the most notable packages I have used with LaTeX. The package provides a highly customizable interface for the creation and edit of the presentation of bibliographic data in the document. Compared to the plain BibTeX, biblatex enables relatively easy customization of the appearance of bibliographic data. Below I provide customizations I used to modify the default biblatex output. The detailed description of the biblatex commands is available in the package documentation .

The two basic commands to enable biblatex and output citation list are

While preparing the thesis I activated biblatex with the following options compiling the document using biblatex with the options below will need custom-numeric-comp.bbx and custom-numeric-comp.cbx files (see next sections, "Biblatex customization" and "Footnote citation") :

Option hyperref=true was specified to transform various citation elements (like citation number, page number where citation appears, hyperlink to the web page where cited document can be found, etc.) into clickable hyperlinks. This option requires hyperref package (see also notes on hyperref ).

With options url=false,isbn=false I disabled printing the URLs and ISBNs in the bibliography.

Back references

Option backref=true enables generation of the back references to the citation, which are usually number(s) of the page where citation appears:

The back reference text preceding the page number ("see p.") can be modified using the following command:

Just a note on the back references. When you are reading a .pdf document, encounter a reference, and click on it, .pdf viewer will change view to the record of this reference in the bibliography. Now, if you want to return to the main text and continue reading, you may find it difficult to do using back reference when the reference was cited on several pages (back reference will contain several page numbers and you have to bear in mind the original page number you came to the bibliography), and a good solution here is to use " Alt + ← " instead of the back reference itself. On the other hand, back references are useful to indicate how often and where a particular reference was cited in the document.

Citation style

Option style=custom-numeric-comp determines the citation style. As seen from its name, the chosen citation style uses numbers ( numeric ) to indicate citations in text, and consequent numbers are compressed ( comp ) into a range: [1,2,3,5] is printed as [1–3,5]. Above it was mentioned that I used footnote version of the standard biblatex numeric-comp style — as a result, each citation has i) its number typeset as superscript, and ii) short and extended reference information located at the bottom of the page ("footnote text") and in the bibliography, respectively:

Option citereset=chapter defines biblatex behavior for the reference footnote text in a typical situation when a citation appears several times in the document: footnote text for the particular citation is printed only once per document chapter ( citereset=chapter ), where chapter is defined according to the LaTeX sectioning commands . In my thesis a typical chapter includes about 20 pages, and I assumed citereset=chapter to be quite acceptable. However, one of my colleagues was confused by such a rule for printing the footnote text (i.e., he did not get the logic behind the rule until I have explained it). I was thinking about resetting footnote text as "once-per-page" (not "once-per-chapter") but decided to avoid this due to high density of the references in my thesis. If you are interested in such a behavior some useful information can be found here .

Number of displayed author names

Options maxcitenames=3 and maxbibnames=100 limit number of authors of the cited document to be printed in the document body and in the bibliography, respectively. If the number of authors exceeds maxcite(bib)names , the author list is truncated according to biblatex settings, and usually printed as "Author1 et al." In my case I have very short authors lists in the footnote text (document body) to reduce space occupied by footnote citations,

and virtually all authors are displayed in the bibliography:

I note that I have prepared my thesis with biblatex v. 0.9a (19.03.2010), while this on-line document was prepared and tested on biblatex v. 1.6 (29.07.2011). Options maxcitenames and maxbibnames were not available in v. 0.9a, and the described biblatex behavior (with maxcitenames=3 and maxbibnames=100 ) was obtained using maxnames=3 while loading the biblatex package, and maxnames=100 while printing the bibliography, i.e.

The next section continues the discussion of the biblatex customization.

Overleaf - LaTeX: Bibliographies and Citing

• Getting Started
• Creating a LaTeX Document in Overleaf
• Structuring and Formatting
• Lists, Tables, Images, and Labelling
• Mathematics in LaTeX
• Bibliographies and Citing
• Books and Dissertations
• Submitting from Overleaf

Bibliographies in LaTeX

In order to cite references, you first need to create a separate bibliography file ending with a .bib extension within your LaTeX project.  You can do that by clicking on the New File icon on the upper-left corner of the screen.

Then, enter your file name. Note that the default file extension in LaTeX is .tex. Your bibliography file must end in .bib. Once you create your file, you can add references to it in the BibTeX format.

Exporting references from ProQuest RefWorks

If you use RefWorks to manage your references, you can export your references from RefWorks into the BibTeX format. To export your references from RefWorks, click on the Share  tab. Then, click on Export References  and select the BibTeX  option. You can import the references you exported from RefWorks into LaTeX as a .bib file.

To learn more about RefWorks, visit the  RefWorks e-course module .

Exporting references from a database or Google Scholar

The easiest way to add references to your .bib file, other than exporting them from RefWorks, is to import or copy them directly from Google Scholar or from a database. To cite from Google Scholar, click on the cite  icon underneath the article, which is represented with a quotation sign. Select the option BibTeX  at the bottom of the pop-up screen. You will be directed to another page where you can copy the reference in the BibTeX format. Make sure to check that the relevant fields are entered correctly before copying the reference into your .bib file.

Note that Google Scholar does not include a DOI, which is often needed as part of your reference.

Some databases also provide the option to export a reference in the BibTeX format. The way to export a reference from a database can vary depending on the database being used.

Note: Not all databases allow you to export citation information in the BibTeX format. To work around this, use RefWorks to manage your references which you can then export in the BibTeX format. 

Entering references manually

When entering a reference to BibTeX, the fields that are required to be filled in for each citation will vary depending on the type of the work you are citing. The reference type is specified by using the @ symbol followed by the type. Regardless of the reference type, the first field to be entered in the reference is the label that you want to give to a particular reference. You will later be able to use this label to cite the reference in the main text of the document.

Below is an example of the fields you are required to enter for articles.

Here's another example illustrating the fields required for a Ph.D. thesis.

Visit the page on standard templates for BibTeX to see how other types of works can be included.

Citing in LaTeX

To begin citing sources within your LaTeX document, you can use the biblatex  package. Add  \usepackage { biblatex } to your preamble. Note that there are other packages that you could use for this, including the natbib  package, which is also a popular option.

There are a number of specifications you can enter to the \usepackage { biblatex } command. The first specification you should add within the  square brackets of the command is backend = biber . Biber provides the relevant information needed to implement the biblatex package.

You can also specify the style of your bibliography by using the style  parameter. For instance, style=authoryear  will print your references in the author-year format. Another common variant is style=authoryear-comp , which will only print the author's last name once, and not for the subsequent references. Visit the page on biblatex's citation styles for a full list.

Using biblatex, you can also determine what criteria should be used to sort your bibliography by specifying the sorting  parameter. For instance, sorting=nyt  will sort your bibliography by name, title, and year. The end result of specifying these parameters may look something like this:

To be able to cite the references from your bibliography, you will need to implement a command mapping your BibTeX file to your document. To do that, you can use the \addbibresource {..} command and add your file name in between the curly brackets.

There are many options to call and format your in-text citations in LaTeX. Below is a list of common commands you can use with the corresponding output. For instance, the command \parencite {JonesandSmith1997} will result in (Jones and Smith 1997) in the pdf.   

Adding the \printbibliography command at the end of the document will instruct LaTeX to print your references.

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Home » LaTeX » LaTeX: How to add bibliography and references?

LaTeX: How to add bibliography and references?

There are two ways to add bibliography (references) to your document. One is for small document with few bibliography items using thebibliography environment. The other is for large documents where there are many bibliography items using packages like biblatex .

1) BIBLIOGRAPHY ON SMALL DOCUMENTS

If you have few bibliography items, which is a general case for small few pages documents, then you can use thebibliography environment to create bibliography on your document. \bibitem command is used to add bibliography items. \cite command is used to cite the bibliography item in the document chapter or section.

Below is an example of creating bibliography using “ thebibliography ” environment. The number “ 10 ” at the beginning of “ thebibliography ” indicates the number of bibliography entries that can be added in the document.

Bibliography will have the title as “ References ” if the document class is “article” and it will have title “ Bibliography ” if the document class is “book” or “report”.

Below is the pdf file generated after you compile the above LaTeX source:

2) BIBLIOGRAPHY ON LARGE DOCUMENTS

For large documents like large report or book, you need to specify .bib file. Bibliographic references are kept in this file. \cite command is used to cite the bibliography items in the document.

Here is an example of the BibTeX database stored in .bib file. Let us name the file as references.bib .

I have used biblatex package which uses bibtex to generate bibliographies. However, now biblatex uses biber as the default backend instead of bibtex .

If you have not installed biber, you need to install it first. Here is the command to install biber on Ubuntu:

Here is the sample LaTeX document that uses references.bib as the bibliography database. In the document chapter, citation is done using \cite command. Package defination and bibliographic resource file is defined in the preamble of the document. \printbibliography command is used to print the bibliography at our desired position.

Suppose that the tex file is named as myfile.tex . To compile the tex and bib file, you need to run the following commands:

Now, myfile.pdf is generated with the bibliography items.

If you are using document class as ‘report’ or ‘book’ then the title will be “ Bibliography ” and if you are using document class as ‘article’ then the bibliography title will be “ References “.

More detail on Bibliography Management

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Related posts:.

• LaTeX: Using APA Reference Style
• LaTeX: Add List of Abbreviations / Nomenclature
• LaTeX: Add Paragraph and Line Spacing
• LaTeX: Remove Chapter Name and Number
• LaTeX: Numbering subsubsection and showing it in Table of Contents

because LaTeX matters

Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

• graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
• subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
• minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
• nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
• listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
• babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
• fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
• hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
• And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

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16 comments.

8. June 2012 at 7:09

I would rather recommend a documentclass like memoir or scrreprt (from KOMA-Script), since they are much more flexible than report.

8. June 2012 at 8:12

I agree, my experience with them is limited though. Thanks for the addendum. Here is the documentation: memoir , scrreprt (KOMA script)

8. June 2012 at 8:02

Nice post Tom. I’m actually writing a two-part (or three) on Writing the PhD thesis: the tools . Feel free to comment, I hope to update it as I write my thesis, so any suggestions are welcome.

8. June 2012 at 8:05

Thanks for the link. I just saw your post and thought I should really check out git sometimes :-). Best, Tom.

8. June 2012 at 8:10

Yes, git is awesome. It can be a bit overwhelming with all the options and commands, but if you’re just working alone, and probably on several machines, then you can do everything effortlessly with few commands.

11. June 2012 at 2:15

That’s what has kept me so far. But I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

8. June 2012 at 8:08

What a great overview. Thank you, this will come handy… when I finally get myself to start writing that thesis 🙂

8. June 2012 at 14:12

Thanks and good luck with your thesis! Tom.

9. June 2012 at 4:08

Hi, I can recommend two important packages: lineno.sty to insert linenumbers (really helpful in the debugging phase) and todonotes (allows you to insert todo-notes for things you still have to do.)

11. June 2012 at 0:48

Thanks Uwe! I wrote an article on both, lineno and todonotes . Here is the documentation: lineno and todonotes for more details.

12. June 2012 at 15:51

Thanks for the post, i’m currently writing my master thesis 🙂

A small note: it seems that subfig is deprecated for the subcaption package: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions#Subfloats

12. June 2012 at 16:05

Hey, thanks for the tip. Too bad they don’t say anything in the documentation apart from the fact that the packages are not compatible.

1. August 2012 at 21:11

good thesis template can be also found here (free): http://enjobs.org/index.php/downloads2

including living headers, empty pages, two-sided with front and main matter as well as a complete structure

2. August 2012 at 11:03

Thanks for the link to the thesis template!

15. November 2012 at 22:21

Hi Tom, I’m writing a report on spanish in LaTex, using emacs, auctex, aspell (~170pags. ~70 files included by now) and this blog is my savior every time because I’m quite new with all these.

The question: Is there anyway (other than \- in every occurrence) to define the correct hyphenation for accented words (non english characters like é)? I have three o four accented words, about the subject of my report, that occur near 100 times each, across several files, and the \hyphenation{} command can’t handle these.

20. November 2012 at 3:47

I was wondering what packages you load in your preamble. For a better hyphenation (and easier typing), you should use these packages:

See here for more details.

If this doesn’t help, please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

Thanks, Tom.

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LaTeX: bibliography per chapter

I am helping a colleague with his PhD thesis and we need to present the bibliography at the end of each chapter.

The question is: does anyone have a minimal working example for this case using latex+bibtex?

The current document structure that we use is the following:

Where main.tex contains packages, document declarations, macros and \include s for each chapter. biblio.bib is the only bibtex file (I think is easier to have all citations in one place).

We have searched and tried with different latex packages, reading and following their documentation. Specifically, bibitems and chapterbib.

bibitems successfully generates bu*.aux files, but when running bibtex for each one of them, an error occurs since there is no \bibdata element in the .aux file.

chapterbib also generates a .aux file, but bibtex finishes with an error caused by using multiple \bibliography{file} in the .tex files (one per chapter).

Some coworkers suggested using a separate bibtex file for each chapter, which could be a problem of maintenance in the future when citing the same publications in different chapters.

We will like to continue having this document structure, if possible. So, if anyone could shed some light to this problem, we will appreciate it.

Update: MWE found Thanks to Habi for the help, here is a working example:

With the document structure mentioned above:

Finally, to generate the document:

• If you'd like to create a working example, I believe this stuff is built in to TeXnicCenter, a windows IDE for TeX documents. –  Greg D Commented May 4, 2010 at 12:46
• chapterbib's issue could be solved by putting a \bibliography in main.tex only, could it not? –  Andrew McGregor Commented May 4, 2010 at 13:16
• 2 I would swear that we've done this before...and after much searching I find stackoverflow.com/questions/2503555/… . Whew. No shame to the OP for not finding that duplicate. –  dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Commented May 4, 2010 at 16:17
• Does this answer your question? Using LaTeX, how can I have a list of references at the end of each section? –  Gert Arnold Commented Jan 11, 2023 at 18:31

That one is a TeX FAQ item :

A separate bibliography for each “chapter” of a document can be provided with the package chapterbib (which comes with a bunch of other good bibliographic things). The package allows you a different bibliography for each \included file (i.e., despite the package’s name, the availability of bibliographies is related to the component source files of the document rather than to the chapters that logically structure the document). [...]

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How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 1): Basic Structure

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Author: Josh Cassidy (August 2013)

This five-part series of articles uses a combination of video and textual descriptions to teach the basics of writing a thesis using LaTeX. These tutorials were first published on the original ShareLateX blog site during August 2013; consequently, today's editor interface (Overleaf) has changed considerably due to the development of ShareLaTeX and the subsequent merger of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf. However, much of the content is still relevant and teaches you some basic LaTeX—skills and expertise that will apply across all platforms.

Your thesis could be the longest and most complicated document you'll ever write, which is why it's such a good idea to use L a T e X instead of a common word processor. L a T e X makes tasks that are difficult and awkward in word processors, far simpler.

When writing something like a thesis its worth splitting up the document into multiple .tex files. It's also wise to organise the project using folders; therefore, we'll create two new folders, one for all the images used in the project and one for all the .tex files making up the main body of the thesis.

• 1 The preamble
• 2 The frontmatter
• 3 The main body
• 4 The endmatter
• 5 All articles in this series

The preamble

In this example, the main.tex file is the root document and is the .tex file that will draw the whole document together. The first thing we need to choose is a document class. The article class isn't designed for writing long documents (such as a thesis) so we'll choose the report class, but we could also choose the book class.

We can also change the font size by adding square brackets into the \documentclass command and specifying the size—we'll choose 12pt. Let's also prepare the document for images by loading the graphicx package. We'll also need to tell L a T e X where to look for the images using the \graphicspath command, as we're storing them in a separate folder.

The start of our preamble now looks like this:

Now we can finish off the preamble by filling in the title, author and date information. To create the simplest title page we can add the thesis title, institution name and institution logo all into the \title command; for example:

This isn't the best way to alter the title page so we'll look at more elaborate ways of customising title pages later on in the series, but this will suffice for now.

This is what the \maketitle command now produces for us:

The frontmatter

After the title page we need to add in an abstract, dedication, declaration and acknowledgements section. We can add each of these in on separate pages using unnumbered chapters. To do this we use the \chapter command and add an asterisk. After these sections we'll add a table of contents using the \tableofcontents command:

The main body

Now for the main body of the document. In this example we will add-in five chapters, one of which will be an introduction and another will be a conclusion. However, instead of just composing these chapters in the main .tex file, we'll create a separate .tex file for each chapter in the chapters folder. We can then fill in these chapters with text remembering to split them up into sections and subsections.

Then to add these chapters into the document, we use the \input command in the root document. Remember to add in chapters/ before the file name so that L a T e X knows where to find it.

The endmatter

We will now add in an appendix at the end of the document. To do this we use the \appendix command to tell L a T e X that what follows are appendices. Again We'll write the appendix in a separate file and then input it.

If we now compile the document, all our chapters will be added to the document and the table of contents will be automatically generated.

Now we have a basic structure for a thesis set up. In the next post I will show you how to change the page layout and add headers.

All articles in this series

• Part 1: Basic Structure ;
• Part 2: Page Layout ;
• Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables ;
• Part 4: Bibliographies with BibLaTeX ;
• Part 5: Customising Your Title Page and Abstract .
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Multiple references in LaTeX

I'm writing a paper and using the IEEEtran.cls in LaTeX. I need to have my references to appear like:

I searched and found that I need to include cite package. However, after I have used cite packages, I get :

How can I get [1-3] instead of [1]-[3]? without using new commands ?

Here is an example of what I have :

the test.bib file:

• ... get [1]-[3] instead of [1]-[3] ? What's the difference? –  nneonneo Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 19:40
• sorry, i mean [1-3] instead of [1]-[3]. –  Eng.Mohd Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 20:14
• @ nneonneo ,check the update!! –  Eng.Mohd Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 20:15
• @vonbrand . I guess that's why I'm asking ? the real output is different from the expected output. I'm 100% sure that I'm getting [1]-[3] instead of [1-3] ? –  Eng.Mohd Commented Feb 16, 2013 at 21:46
• I use IEEEtran and in no way does it behave like you say.. If you want help, you'll need to give a minimal example (one I can copy completely into my latex and compile) where the problem occurs. –  Nathan G Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 1:33

2 Answers 2

I wouldn't use the conference mode of IEEE but use ieeeconf directly instead if I were you but that's another story.

IEEE has certain standards and all their classes, not surprisingly, obey those standards. What you are asking is something IEEE doesn't want and that's why it's not supported. However for personal use you can override it. Using natbib is not a good idea with IEEE as it's specifically discouraged.

• thank you it works. Regarding your suggestion to use ieeeconf. I tried to use it directly(\documentclass{ieeeconf}), got an error? Any suggestion ? –  EngS Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 18:29
• @Eng.Mohd You can simply look at your conference website for the class file. Usually each IEEE community, places one style file for the author kit and place it in your document directory. –  percusse Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 19:36
• 1 Unfortunately, this what I found on the website. It's IEEEtran where you provide the mode[conference]. –  EngS Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 20:46

instead of \usepackage{cite} .

• 1 You may also want to provide the option numbers . This tells natbib that it's dealing with a numeric rather than an author-year citation style. –  Mico Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 13:57
• Jan and Mico. Thank you . But I would like to make it with \cite. @NathanG check the example that I provide to make you believe! –  EngS Commented Feb 17, 2013 at 15:33
• I much prefer natbib , but unfortunately find myself in positions where cite is required, like with the template for the PLOS One journal. –  ryanjdillon Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 11:21
• You really need: \renewcommand{\citedash}{--} \renewcommand{\citepunct}{,} –  David Wood Commented Sep 4, 2019 at 23:38

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