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BibTeX

This guide provides an overview of using the reference manager, BibTeX.

Processing Citation Commands

In order for LaTeX to display the in-text citations and reference list entries added to the LaTeX document, the document must be processed several times using both LaTeX and BibTeX. The following commands must be run in the order specified (file_name refers to the name of the .tex document being processed):

  1. latex file_name    (the .tex extension of the file is not included in this command)
  2. bibtex file_name   (this step runs BibTeX on the citations found by LaTeX and pulls the appropriate citation information into the document)
  3. latex file_name
  4. latex file_name

These commands can be run from a command line interface or from the TeX editor of choice.  Along the way, various error messages will be generated but each pass works to resolve the errors.