Example Documents

Below are copies of the files you will need to produce a minimal working example of the bibliography-creation process explained below. You can also find a live version of this example here.

What is BibTeX?

bibtex is a program that dynamically builds bibliographies from LaTeX manuscripts. Using bibTeX instead of writing a bibliography by hand has numerous benefits:

The bibliography is automatically correctly formatted and alphabetized; it is trivial to change the way in which entries are displayed.
Adding or removing entries is trivial; you can have a .bib file that contains unused entries without impacting the realized bibliography.
bibTeX-formatted entries are automatically available on NASA ADS

Making a bibliography

The bibliography entries are stored in a .bib file. This is simply a list of entries that contain all of the information that bibtex needs to write the bibliography. Here is an example file:

And let’s take a look inside this file. Here we have two entries:

@ARTICLE{luo2023,
       author = {{Luo}, Yifei and {Leauthaud}, Alexie and {Greene}, Jenny and {Huang}, Song and {Kado-Fong}, Erin and {Danieli}, Shany and {Li}, Ting S. and {Li}, Jiaxuan and {Blanco}, Diana and {Wasleske}, Erik J. and {Wick}, Joseph and {Mintz}, Abby and {Guan}, Runquan and {Peter}, Annika H.~G. and {Baldassare}, Vivienne and {Brooks}, Alyson and {Banerjee}, Arka and {Bhattacharyya}, Joy and {Cai}, Zheng and {Chen}, Xinjun and {Gunn}, Jim and {Johnson}, Sean D. and {Kelvin}, Lee S. and {Li}, Mingyu and {Lin}, Xiaojing and {Lupton}, Robert and {Mace}, Charlie and {Medina}, Gustavo E. and {Read}, Justin and {Cordova Rosado}, Rodrigo and {Seifert}, Allen},
        title = "{The Merian Survey: Design, Construction, and Characterization of a Filter Set Optimized to Find Dwarf Galaxies and Measure their Dark Matter Halo Properties with Weak Lensing}",
      journal = {arXiv e-prints},
     keywords = {Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies, Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
         year = 2023,
        month = may,
          eid = {arXiv:2305.19310},
        pages = {arXiv:2305.19310},
          doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2305.19310},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2305.19310},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.GA},
       adsurl = {<https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023arXiv230519310L>},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

@ARTICLE{gunn1972,
       author = {{Gunn}, James E. and {Gott}, J. Richard, III},
        title = "{On the Infall of Matter Into Clusters of Galaxies and Some Effects on Their Evolution}",
      journal = {\\apj},
         year = 1972,
        month = aug,
       volume = {176},
        pages = {1},
          doi = {10.1086/151605},
       adsurl = {<https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972ApJ...176....1G>},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

Each entry is formatted as follows:

@ENTRY_TYPE { variablename,
	[... entry information ...]
}

Where ENTRY_TYPE refers to the type of work that will be referenced (e.g. ARTICLE, BOOK, PROCEEDINGS), and variablename is a variable name of your choice that you will use when citing the work within your LaTeX manuscript. For example, to cite this work we add the following text to our .tex LaTeX file:

And here is a reference to the work \\cite{variablename}.