BIBTEX(1)

💖 BIBTEX(1) — the manual page, bestie 💖

okay so this is the manual page for bibtex, from Web2C 2025. she's a classic. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

bibtex — make a bibliography for (La)TeX. that's the whole job, that's her lane, and she ate 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

bibtex [-min-crossrefs=number] [-terse] auxname[.aux]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

real talk: this manual page is not meant to be exhaustive, bestie. the complete documentation for this version of TeX lives in the info file, or in the manual Web2C: A TeX implementation. so if you need the full tea, that's where it's at 📖

BibTeX reads the top-level auxiliary (.aux) file auxname — the one that got output while you were running latex(1) or tex(1) — and it creates a bibliography (.bbl) file that will get incorporated into your document on subsequent runs of LaTeX or TeX. it's giving glow-up pipeline ✨

BibTeX looks up, in bibliographic database (.bib) files specified by the \bibliography command, the entries specified by the \cite and \nocite commands in the LaTeX or TeX source file. then it formats the info from those entries according to instructions in a bibliography style (.bst) file (specified by the \bibliographystyle command), and it outputs the results to the .bbl file. iconic behaviour, no cap 👑

the LaTeX manual explains what a LaTeX source file has to contain to work with BibTeX. Appendix B of the manual describes the format of the .bib files. and the BibTeXing document describes extensions and details of this format, plus it gives other useful hints for using BibTeX. very much the iykyk of it all 🎀

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -min-crossrefs — this one defines the minimum number of crossref required for automatic inclusion of the crossref base entry in the citation list; the default is two. if you want to avoid these automatic inclusions altogether, give this option a sufficiently large number, and be sure to remove any previous .aux and .bbl files. otherwise the option may appear to have no effect, since BibTeX will have added the citation for the base entry to the .aux file, and nothing will remove it. so like... clean up after yourself fr fr 🧹
• -terse — with this option, BibTeX operates silently. without it, a banner and progress reports are printed on stdout. not me choosing peace and quiet 🙈

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

BibTeX searches the directories in the path defined by the BSTINPUTS environment variable for .bst files. if BSTINPUTS is not set, it uses the system default. for .bib files, it uses the BIBINPUTS environment variable if that is set, otherwise the default. see tex(1) for the details of the searching 👀

if the environment variable TEXMFOUTPUT is set, BibTeX attempts to put its output files in it, if they cannot be put in the current directory. again, see tex(1). and heads up: no special searching is done for the .aux file. that one's on its own, bestie 😭

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🎀 FILES 🎀

• *.bst — bibliography style files.
• btxdoc.tex — BibTeXing — LaTeXable documentation for general BibTeX users.
• btxhak.tex — Designing BibTeX Styles — LaTeXable documentation for style designers.
• btxdoc.bib — database file for those two documents.
• xampl.bib — database file giving examples of all standard entry types.
• btxbst.doc — template file and documentation for the standard styles.

all those files should be available somewhere on your system, ok? they're out there 🦋

also, the host math.utah.edu has a vast collection of .bib files available for anonymous ftp, including references for all the standard TeX books and a complete bibliography for TUGboat. a whole archive, a whole vibe 🌸

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

latex(1), tex(1).

Leslie Lamport, LaTeX - A Document Preparation System, Addison-Wesley, 1985, ISBN 0-201-15790-X.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Oren Patashnik, Stanford University. this man page describes the web2c version of BibTeX. other ports of BibTeX — such as Donald Knuth's version using the Sun Pascal compiler — do not have the same path searching implementation, or the command-line options. so if you're on a different port, adjust expectations accordingly, periodt 💀

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this is bibtex 0.99d, dated 18 March 2024, and she's still serving 💖 go make a bibliography, you're gonna slay 🫶✨