Using Endnote and BibTeX to make your Bibliography in LaTeX
A Short Explanation of the Process
It is possible to make your bibliography from scratch, and to manulally put in all your citations, but this would be to ignore the hard work that many people have done on your behalf, to develop a system that will organize and format your bibliography, manage your citations and format everything in the style that you choose. These tools are BibTeX and Endnote. BibTeX is a processing engine that takes a database developed by you and applies it to a document in which you refer to entries in that database. Endnote is a program which has been developed to make the database that BibTeX looks for.
In short what happens is this: You write a file (foo.tex) in which you use the command \cite{DoyleOwl:2003} . When you LaTeX this file, the LaTeX processing engine sees this and knows that another processing engine will come through and fix this in the future, so it writes this in the foo.aux file to wait for another engine to take care of it. You have using endnote, or on your own, created a file called foo.bib. This file is a database that includes information on every source that you cited in foo.tex. Information like author, title, year of publication, how it was published and what type of publication it is. When you run BibTeX, it combs through the foo.aux file to find everything that LaTeX couldnt handle, and interprets those files on its own. BibTeX does three things. 1) It interpets the \cite commands, using foo.bib. 2) It finds which entries in foo.bib have actually been used. 3) Using the information it gathered in step two, it writes the bibliography. All this BibTeX puts in a file called foo.bbl. Now when you run LaTeX, it fills in the bibliography and matches citations to data, and when you run it again it has filled in all the citations and the bibliography correctly and neatly. This is summarized in the image below:
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LaTeX uses two files to make a document with a bibliography-foo.tex and foo.bib. The above images shows how the LaTeX and BibTeX engines manipulate these files to make the final product foo.tex. |
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Making a .bib file from your Endnote library.
- Open up your endnote library.
- Go to Edit and hit Output Styles. Click on Open Style Manager.
- Scroll down untill you see "BibTeX Export" and click in the box to the left of it to mark it as one of your favorite styles.
- Close the Style Manager and now go to Edit:Output Styles and click on "BibTeX Export." Make sure that the check mark is next to "BibTeX Export."
- Make sure that all of your references have an entry in the "Label" field. This entry should be what you use to refer to them in LaTeX with the \cite{} command. The label should be a single string without any whitespace, something like
fooman:1989. Make sure that your label does not have any special characters in it, like &, % or $. You should also make sure that you dont put any characters with accents in the label, such as é or ï. Latex will not process these characters well and will stop the file from compiling.
- Go to Edit and hit Select All.
- Now go to File and select Export.... Name the file with the same name as the .tex file that you are using, i.e. if your LaTeX file is "foo.tex", name your .bib file "foo.bib." Save the file in the same directory as your .tex file.
- You can now open up the .bib file in TeXShop or TextEdit. You will need to go through the file and fix any entries that have strange characters in them such as &, %, $ or accented leters. Note: You could have done this in Endnote, and it may be worth it to modify all your Endnote entries if you are continually updating your .bib file using Endnote.
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Making a .bib file manually.
If you already have all your bibliographic information and you just want to import it into BibTeX, then you may want to go ahead and make your .bib file manually.
- Open a text editor. (like TextEdit, Simple Text or Notepad)
- You will need to enter your bibliographic information in a form that BibTeX will understand. The format for a book is:
| @book{DoyleOwl:2004, | <--This is the Label, and type of citation |
| Author = {Doyle Owl}, | <--Author Field |
| Title = {My Life}, | <--Title Field |
| Publisher = {Reed Press}, | <--Publisher Field |
| Year = {2004}} | <--Year Feild |
For a Journal Article:
| @article{DoyleOwl:2003, | <--This is the Label, and type of citation |
| Author = {Doyle Owl}, | <--Author Field |
| Title = {The Honor Principle}, | <--Title Field |
| Journal = {The Quest}, | <--Journal Field |
| Year = {2003}} | <--Year Feild |
There are many other optional fields that you can use in each database entry, such as Volume=, Number=, Abstract=, Series=, Month=. All of the accecptable fields and entry types are listed below. For more information take a look at the LaTeX books at the Help Desk.
| @article | Journal Article |
| @book | Book |
| @booklet | Book without publisher |
| @conference | Article in conference proceedings |
| @inbook | Section of a book with page range |
| @incollection | A part of a book with its own title |
| @manual | Technical Documentation |
| @mastersthesis | Masters Thesis |
| @misc | When you dont know what else to use |
| @phdthesis | PhD Thesis |
| @proceedings | The Proceedings of a Conference |
| @techreport | Technical Report |
| @unpublished | Unpublished work |
|
| address | Address of Publisher |
| author | Names of Authors |
| booktitle | Book Title when part of book is cited |
| chapter | Chapter Number |
| edtion | Book Edition |
| institution | Sponsoring Institution of Technical Report |
| journal | Journal Name |
| month | Month Published |
| note | Any more Info? |
| Number | Number of Journal |
| Organization | Organization that sponsors a conference |
| pages | Page range |
| publisher | Publisher's Name |
| school | Name of school for thesis |
| series | Book Series Name |
| title | Title of work |
| type | Type of Technical Report |
| volume | Volume Number of Book or Journal |
| year | Year of publication |
|
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Setting up your LaTeX file to use Your .bib File
Now that you have created your .bib file, you need to tell LaTeX to process it when it processes your file. To do this, you need to put at the end of your document three lines:
| \bibliography{foo} | |
| \bibliographystyle{filename} |
| \nocite{*} | <--This makes all the entries in your .bib file appear in your bibliography. |
These are the three lines, but to customize them for your document, read the information below.
- \bibliography{foo} This is the line that tell BibTeX which file to look at when it is looking for your .bib file. So if your .bib file is foo.bib ten you want \bibliography{foo} and if your .bib file is thesis.bib then you want \bibliography{thesis}. If you have more than one .bib file, you can enter them all like this: \bibliography{foo,foo1,foo2}.
- \nocite{*} BibTeX automatically references every citation you make and will only make a reference to the sources that you actually cited. If you want to reference more than what you have actually cited within your paper, you need to put in this line. If you only want to insert specific sources into your references from your .bib file, then you can modify this command so that it is: \nocite{key_1,key_2,...} where label_1 and label_2 are the labels of your respective sources.
- \bibliographystyle{filename} There are many ways that your bibliography can be formatted by BibTeX. A few are shown below. There are many more styles availible than are shown here. If you do a google search for "BibTeX Styles", you will get more than you probably want. To use the style bar.bst type in \bibliographystyle{bar}.
As many styles are availible this way, if you are in the humanities, your department may want you to cite articles with the Author-Date method. The Author-Date style is where your Citations come out as (Doyle, 2004 100-103) rather than [1, 100-103]. Unfortunately, the Author-Date Citation style is not supported by BibTeX alone. But as is usually the case, people have written packages to plug this gap. chicago.sty and apalike.sty are two packages that people have put togeather that allow users to use a Author-Date citation style. natbib.sty is a package that allows a great range of different inline and parenthetical citation styles. To use one of these packages put \usepackage{package_name} at the top of your document after your \documentclass command. For more indepth instructions on how to use natbib.sty, apalike.sty or chicago.sty look on CTAN or in the books at the Help Desk.
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BibTeX Styles
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