BibTeX

BibTeX (proper spelling: ) is a program for creating of literature data and directories in TeX or LaTeX documents, developed by Oren Patashnik.

Operation

To create a bibliography, all citation references are retrieved and assigned to the corresponding work on a literature database from a LaTeX document. In the literature database is a text file (. Bib file ), in which all known information about a work ( book, Scientific publication, website, etc.) in a specific syntax are listed.

The works cited are sorted and listed by a corresponding statement in the LaTeX document. The formatting of this literature is variable. The set in the document BibTeX style (English style) determines what information will be shown in what formatting.

BibTeX is able to work smoothly with very large literature collections as well as with very large documents. BibTeX has therefore established in the scientific community for many years as an open standard format for references.

When using LaTeX, a text file with the extension. Aux is generated with the first run of LaTeX. With the run BibTeX from the. Aux file and the. Bib file (and the. Bst style file ) creates another text file with the extension. Bbl, which contains exactly those requested in the document entries from the Literature database. The next time you run LaTeX this. Bbl file is used to generate the bibliography. So it's always a LaTeX - BibTeX - LaTeX necessary.

Example

The following example ( taken from a BibTeX file )

@ article { lin1973,      author = { Shen Lin and Brian W. Kernighan },      title = {An Effective Heuristic Algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem },      journal = { Operations Research },      volume = { 21},      year = { 1973 },      pages = { 498-516 },   } is plain by the BibTeX style in this edition in the bibliography (English bibliography ) transferred:

The command \ cite { } lin1973 within a LaTeX document is replaced with the one specified in the BibTeX file with this ID reference, in the example " ". Generated the list of references in the document using the \ bibliography { } command literature when the associated BibTeX file containing the bibliography entries has the file name literature.bib.

In addition to the BibTeX style plain, in which the references are numbered, there is the style alpha, in which the key is a combination of initials of the authors and year of publication of the work. In addition, there are several variations of these styles, which differ mainly in the representation of bibliography and often specific to various scientific publishing, conferences and journals.

BibTeX standardized case- insensitive title by Anglo-Saxon standards: Depending on EntryType either the first word and all other small or large but all words capitalized except for a few English particles. By doubling the curly brackets after title = this mechanism can be suppressed, which can be used by default for German -language literature entries. This, however sorting the so masked string is changed. Therefore, it is advisable to use a BibTeX style that fully implements the German habits, such as jurabib.

Who has not cited, but want to mention a source, does so by \ nocite lin1973 { }.

History and alternatives

BibTeX was written by Oren Patashnik and Leslie Lamport in 1985 in WEB / Pascal. Version 0.98f was released in March 1985. With version 0.99c of February 1988 stagnated for 22 years. Version 0.99d was released in March 2010 and announced the development.

Between 1988 and 2010, when the development stagnated by Patashnik, alternatives have been developed to replace BibTeX:

  • BibTeXu is a re - implementation of Yannis Haralambous and its students, who uses the UTF- 8 character set.
  • Bibtex8 supports 8- bit character sets.
  • CL- BibTeX is a fully compatible replacement for BibTeX. It is programmed with Common Lisp and also supports Unicode.
  • MLBibTeX is a re - implementation of BibTeX, which is characterized by the support of multiple languages; it is written by Jean -Michel Hufflen.
  • Biblatex is new from the ground up. "It redesigns the way in Which LaTeX interacts with BibTeX at a fairly fundamental level. With biblatex, BibTeX is only used to sort the bibliography and to generate labels. Instead of being Implemented in BibTeX 's style files, the formatting of the bibliography is Entirely controlled by TeX macros. " ( "It changes the way in LaTeX using BibTeX interacts on a very basic level. Using biblatex ) will BibTeX only to sort the bibliography and to generate the labels (labels used. Formatting of the entries is not implemented as BibTeX format file, but is entirely controlled by TeX macros. " )
  • Beaver BibTeX replacement for users of biblatex. Among the advantages over BibTeX include the Unicode 6.0 support, language-specific sorting and UTF -8 Zitierschlüssel ( citekeys ).

Types of literature (Entry Types)

The following table gives a complete overview of the types of literature (Entry Types) and related fields (Fields ) used in BibTeX. It can be distinguished from the optional required (required) fields. All other fields are ignored rule of BibTeX. One other than the standard BibTeX styles are used, they may require from the table other names and conventions.

BibTeX styles

The appearance of the bibliography and the citations is determined by the BibTeX style files. BibTeX style files have the suffix. Bst and include instructions in a stack-based programming language that define the formatting of the bibliography entries. The bibtex program formats the entries according to the specifications of such a style file. It is usually a file is output, which consists of TeX or LaTeX instructions, but there are also style files that generate HTML.

The style files are included with the LaTeX command \ bibliographystyle