A short guide linking to documentation, resources for bibliographic citation styles, and other useful tools to use when citing sources using .bib files and associated packages.
Some tools, like the Astrophysics Data System (ADS), Inspec, and Google Scholar, make exporting to BibTeX user-friendly. They escape special characters and generate citation keys for you. Other tools are a bit less straightforward.
In general, the BibTeX export will be located in either an "export" or "cite" menu just above your search results. The cite menu is sometimes activated with an icon that looks like a quotation mark. It can be more effective to use a reference management tool like Zotero to manage your references, so we recommend taking a look at that tab for more information on semi-automated ways to manage your references.
Here are some additional pages with specialized information for you.
TeXMed is just an interface to NCBI PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, that allows you to query PubMed and to store references in BibTeX format.
Quick summary: Once you've found a citation you want to save, just go to the bottom of the article information page and export using the options in the Output Record box.
Quick summary: Click the Cite button in the light blue bar above your search results. A box will come up that will walk you through citing the resource(s). Select BibTeX as your citation style, then press the orange "Change" button. Copy the citation to your .bib file. NOTE THAT YOU WILL NEED TO PROVIDE THE IDENTIFIERS FOR EXPORTED CITATIONS.
Reed College has provided several modified versions of APA, MLA, and Chicago. Click on the name of the style you want to download under the Styles Recommended by Reed section. Place the style in the directory of your paper.
This tool tidies bibtex files by fixing inconsistent whitespace and special characters, removing duplicates, removing unwanted fields, and sorting entries. It has a lot of options in the right-hand column to help you with messy BibTeX files.
A quick, easy guide to using .bib files and EndNote at the same time. A quick guide from Overleaf on using RefWorks.The LaTeX Bibliography Resources page includes information about LaTeX templates, many of which include a bibliography style and sample bib file to get you started. If you need to locate another style, though, here are some instructions. Please note that templates built for BibTeX + natbib will not always easily translate to ones built for biber/Biblatex if the template is complex.
We start by searching for filetype:bst and the name of whatever we're looking for. In the example search, I'm looking for the style for Geophysical Research. If you are using biber, you can look for a bbx style file with filetype:bbx .
You should see a variety of results that all have that filetype. Use online savviness to avoid clicking on results that might not be safe — we're dealing with code files, after all. Many people will put style files on GitHub or on their academic personal websites. Often, the creator will upload the style file as a text document that you can copy-paste into Overleaf or save into the directory you're working from on your computer.
Please note that many of these styles are generated using command line utilities. Take note of what was used (in this case, docstrip) so that you can search for it if you need to debug. Some of the command line-generated style files will cause package conflicts. See the Troubleshooting tab on this guide for a common example.
Once you have pasted in the contents, you're fine to add it to the document preamble.
