Martin Thoma A blog about Code, Politics, and my life

Citations with LaTeX

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Managing citations is a core task when writing scientific documents. Of course, there are lots of options to do this with LaTeX. This makes it super confusing. If you need help, try tex.stackexchange.com. The people there are super helpful and extremely knowledgeable. If you don't even know how to formulate your question properly, try the tex webchat.

This is an article I had for quite a while as a draft. As part of my yearly cleanup, I've published it without finishing it. It might not be finished or have other problems.

Minimal Example

This is in my LaTeX-examples repository.

The main.tex looks as follows:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}

\usepackage[raiselinks=true,
            bookmarks=true,
            bookmarksopenlevel=1,
            bookmarksopen=true,
            bookmarksnumbered=true,
            breaklinks,
            hyperindex=true,
            plainpages=false,
            pdfpagelabels=true,
            pdfborder={0 0 0.5}]{hyperref}

\usepackage[
natbib,
backend=biber,
style=alphabetic,
citestyle=authoryear
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{bibliography.bib}

\begin{document}
Reference sentences are too often Lorem Ipsum \parencites[p. 345]{alice}[p. 123]{bob}
\end{document}

and the bibliography.bib like this:

% Encoding: UTF-8
@article{alice,
  title={The Theory of Lorem},
  author={Al Alice},
  journal={Journal of Foo},
  volume={5},
  number={4},
  pages={123--456},
  year={1992},
  publisher={Springer}
}

@Book{bob,
  title     = {A guide to Ipsum},
  publisher = {Cambridge university press},
  year      = {2010},
  author    = {Bobby Bob},
}

Compile it with:

pdflatex main.tex -output-format=pdf
biber main
pdflatex main.tex -output-format=pdf

The bibliography file

This is the core for your citations. Your citation library, if you will. You can fill this file with JabRef or by hand.

Packages

  • natbib
  • biber

Commands

% Normal one: Cite two elements
\cite{ref2007, ref2009}

% Cite in parenthesis
\citep{ref2007, ref2009}

% Cite only year in parenthesis
\citet{ref2007, ref2009}

% Change multiple options
\parencites[p. 123]{ref2007}[p. 456]{ref2009}

See also