Bibliography

BibTeX is a standard tool for creating bibliography in LaTeX. It requires creating a database of references stored in a file with bib extension. Creating it is easy nowadays, because many publishers provide references to their publications in BibTeX format.

An example mylib.bib file is shown below:

@ARTICLE{Vickrey1961,

AUTHOR = {W. Vickrey},

TITLE = {Counterspeculation, auctions and sealed tenders},

JOURNAL = {Journal of Finance},

YEAR = {1961},

volume = {16},

pages = {8--37},

@BOOK{Golumbic2004,

AUTHOR = {M. C. Golumbic},

TITLE = {Algorithmic Graph Theory and Perfect Graphs},

PUBLISHER = {Elsevier Science},

YEAR = {2004},

edition = {2nd Edition},

Each entry is identified with a label given after the first opening curly bracket. This label is later used to reference the entry in the text of the main document. Here is an example that uses the above bibliography file:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

To achieve incentive compatibility, the auction winner has to pay the second highest price \cite{Vickrey1961}.

A good introduction to graph algorithms can be found in \cite{Golumbic2004}.

\bibliographystyle{plain}

\bibliography{mylib}

\end{document}

Bibliography items are referenced using command \cite{label}. Command \bibliographystyle indicates what style of references should be used, while command \bibliography indicates where the bibliography items are stored. The result looks as follows:

The plain style of bibliography shown above uses numbers as references. There is a number of other bibliography styles in LaTeX. An example using apacite style is shown below:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{apacite}

\begin{document}

\citeA{Vickrey1961} showed that incentive compatibility is guaranteed if the auction winner has to pay the second highest price.

\bibliographystyle{apacite}

\bibliography{mylib}

\end{document}

Style apacite requires using package apacite. In addition to \cite command, it also provides (among many others) \citeA command, which allows for citations that look as follows:

Note that here the reference (Golumbic 2004) is not included in the list of references even though it exists in the bib file, since it has not been referenced to in the text.