Guide to LaTeX, Fourth Edition

12 Bibliographic Databases and BIBTEX

In academic publications, a bibliography or list of references is standard procedure. In Section 11.3 we describe how a bibliography can be formatted with the thebibliography environment and how its entries are referred to within the text. Often authors find that they are constantly referring to the same publications in most of their own papers. Similarly, researchers working in the same field will frequently be referring to the same set of papers. This means that many of the entries in the thebibliography environment will be repeated from one work to the next, or even among co-workers at one institute.

It would be very useful if the bibliographic entries could be stored in one database file once and for ...