Citations and BibTex

Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How can I add footnotes and bibliographies to a LaTeX document?

• How can I use BibTeX to organize citations for larger projects?

Objectives

• Learn how to place references within the text of a scholarly article.

• Learn how to associate references in the text with citations organized in a BibTex file.

• Learn how to generate a bibliography from the citations in BibTex.

Footnotes

We can use the \footnote{} command to add citations as footnotes, where the argument will be the text of the footnote. First let’s start a Literature Review section (you can delete the \lipsum from the Introduction so it’s easier to see our lit review):

\section{Literature Review}
The scientific method was created a long time ago. One person who gets a lot of credit is Galileo Galilee. But others note that the scholar Ibn Al-Haytham developed similar thinking around 1000 CE in Basra and Baghdad. 

Now let’s add some footnotes to acknowledge our sources, using the \footnote{} command:

\section{Literature Review}
The scientific method was created a long time ago. One person who gets a lot of credit is Galileo Galilee\footnote{Finocchiaro, M. (2012). \textit{Galileo and the Art of Reasoning: Rhetorical Foundation of Logic and Scientific Method.} Springer}. But others note that the scholar Ibn Al-Haytham developed similar thinking around 1000 CE in Basra and Baghdad\footnote{Gorini R. Al-Haytham the Man of Experience: First Steps in the Science of Vision. \textit{J Inter Soc for the History of Islamic Medicine (JISHIM)} 2003;2(4):53–55.}. 

When you recompile the document now, you should see the formatted footnotes at the bottom of the page.

BibTeX

You can manually add citations and footnotes in this manner, but you can see that the citation styles above don’t match each other. It’s also time-consuming to manually add citations in the text over and over. Rather than formatting each citation on its own, we can use a tool and file format called BibTeX to format our citations and footnotes consistently across a scholarly work.

There are a number of different ways to use BibTeX on Overleaf. We’ll use the ‘biblatex’ package. First, you’ll want to add your references to a .bib (plain-text) file in the BibTex file format. Then we’ll import the biblatex package and use its \addbibresource{} command to refer to our .bib file. You can often generate citations in BibTex format directly from scholarly databases or you can export them from citation managers like Zotero or Mendeley.

1. Download the refs.bib file which includes the citations from the example above in proper BibTex format.
2. Upload the file to Overleaf.

1. You should now see a refs.bib file and main.tex in your file navigator in Overleaf. Open the refs.bib file and take a look at the contents.
2. To use these references in your LaTeX document you can import the biblatex package and also refer to the name of the refs.bib file with the \addbibresource{} command. Add the following to the header of the main.tex file:

   \usepackage{biblatex} 
   \addbibresource{refs.bib}
   

Then we can replace the footnotes with the \cite{} command using the citation-key for each reference as the cite command’s argument. The citation-key is the first item in the curly brackets following a BibTex entry. For example, ‘tbackhi_ibn_2007’ is the citation-key in the @article{tbakhi_ibn_2007} reference. You can change the citation-keys to be anything you want, but usually they consist of the author’s name and year.

\section{Literature Review}
The scientific method was created a long time ago. One person who gets a lot of credit is Galileo Galilee \cite{finocchiaro_galileo_1980}. But others note that the scholar Ibn Al-Haytham developed similar thinking around 1000 CE in Basra and Baghdad \cite{tbakhi_ibn_2007}.

You’ll notice that the numbered citation footnotes show up in the text, but the references don’t appear as footnotes at the bottom of the page anymore. To add our list of references, we can add the command \printbibliography at the end of the document:

\printbibliography
\end{document}

If you want the Bibliography to follow a specific citation style there are a variety of styles you can pass as an option in the \usepackage{biblatex} command via [style=...]. If you are submitting your paper for an IEEE publication, for example, you can add the following to the head of your document:

\usepackage[style=ieee]{biblatex} 

This is a nice feature since you can easily switch citation styles if, for example, a paper is rejected by one publisher and you want to submit it somewhere else.

Challenge 1

Can you change the style of your citations to use Chicago’s Author/Date formatting? It should look something like the examples below.

Note: do you have to add any other characters to the \cite{} commands in your text to make those citations appear correctly (with parentheses)?

Answer

Add the chicago-authordate style to your \usepackage options, and add parentheses around the \cite{} commands in your text:

\usepackage[style=chicago-authordate]{biblatex} 
...
The scientific method was created a long time ago. One person who gets a lot of credit is Galileo Galilee (\cite{finocchiaro_galileo_1980}). But others note that the scholar Ibn Al-Haytham developed similar thinking around 1000 CE in Basra and Baghdad (\cite{tbakhi_ibn_2007}).

Note that there are also additional commands one can use with biblatex that will modify the formatting of the citations. In this case, \parencite{} will add the parentheses automatically:

\usepackage[style=chicago-authordate]{biblatex} 
...
The scientific method was created a long time ago. One person who gets a lot of credit is Galileo Galilee \parencite{finocchiaro_galileo_1980}. But others note that the scholar Ibn Al-Haytham developed similar thinking around 1000 CE in Basra and Baghdad \parencite{tbakhi_ibn_2007}.

Key Points

• You can manually add footnotes inline with the text using the \footnote{} command.

• BibTeX is a file format that allows you to keep track of citation data separately from your main LaTeX document.

• You can reference citations in a BibTeX file using the biblatex package.

• You can change the citation style used in biblatex by passing the [style=...] option.