Using BibTeX

If you use the BibTeX program by Oren Patashnik (highly recommended if you need a bibliography of more than a couple of titles) to maintain your bibliography, you don't use the thebibliography environment. Instead, you include the lines

        \bibliographystyle{style}
        \bibliography{bibfile}

where style refers to a file style.bst, which defines how your citations will look. The standard styles distributed with BibTeX are:

alpha

Sorted alphabetically. Labels are formed from name of author and year of publication.

plain

Sorted alphabetically. Labels are numeric.

unsrt

Like plain, but entries are in order of citation.

abbrv

Like plain, but more compact labels.

In addition, numerous other BibTeX style files exist tailored to the demands of various publications.

The argument to \bibliography refers to the file bibfile.bib, which should contain your database in BibTeX format. Only the entries referred to via \cite and \nocite will be listed in the bibliography.