Using a bibliograph with LaTeX

The goal of a bibliographic system is to insert into a paper a properly formatted reference for each paper which the author cites. It's important to make sure that

• the reference is formatted properly for the particular journal to which you've submitted
• there is an entry in the "Bibliography" section for every cited paper
• there is an actual citation in the paper for every entry in the "Bibliography"

You COULD do all that by hand ... typing sequences of characters like

           Smith and Jones (2003)

and then adding the proper list of authors, journal, volume and page and year in the bibliography ... but it would be easy to make mistakes.

Remember this repetitive incantation, and all will be well:

   latex   paper.tex
   bibtex  paper
   latex   paper.tex
   latex   paper.tex

Here's an example:

• simple_bib.tex the LaTeX source for the body of a paper
• mwr_bib.bib the BibTeX source for the bibliography
• simple_bib.pdf the formatted paper, with bibliography

For more information

• A very good source for bibliographic information is the Astrophysics Data Service. In addition to providing references, they can also create the bibliographic format that LaTeX expects:
  • Guide to using BibTeX entries created by ADS
• Some astronomers use AstroNAT to manage their personal collections of references.