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Glossary

BibTeX: bibliographic records as plain text, formatted at compile time

BibTeX stores bibliographic records as plain text, one entry per source, each tagged with a type such as @article or @book and a unique citation key. A LaTeX document pulls from the .bib file and builds the reference list automatically, so switching styles means editing one line rather than every entry.

Why it matters when you are writing

The appeal is separation of concerns. Your .bib file holds the facts about each source; the style file decides how those facts are punctuated and ordered. Change the bibliography style and the entire list re-formats, which is what makes BibTeX worth the setup cost when you are submitting the same manuscript to journals with different requirements.

Two things break more BibTeX builds than anything else. The first is capitalization: many styles lowercase titles, so a proper noun needs protecting inside braces — title = {Framing Uncertainty in {P}olicy {T}exts} — or it will come out wrong and you will not notice until the proofs. The second is duplicate or unstable citation keys, which is why a convention like surnameYearFirstword is worth adopting on day one.

Entries exported from publisher sites and databases are convenient and frequently wrong: missing DOIs, journal names abbreviated inconsistently, page ranges with the wrong dash, author fields that mangle particles like “van der.” Treat an export as a draft. Reading the .bib file once, in full, before you submit is faster than answering a copy editor’s queries afterward.

IN PRACTICE

An @article entry

@article{okonkwo2021framing, author = {Okonkwo, Adaeze and Reyes, Luis}, title = {Framing Uncertainty in {P}olicy {T}exts}, journal = {Journal of Applied Linguistics}, year = {2021}, volume = {42}, number = {3}, pages = {44--61}, doi = {10.1234/jal.2021.0423}}

OFTEN CONFUSED WITH

What BibTeX is not

BibLaTeX
BibLaTeX is a newer package with richer fields and full Unicode support; it reads .bib files but is not the same processor as BibTeX.
RIS
RIS is the interchange format most reference managers export for Word workflows; BibTeX is the format LaTeX consumes directly.

Questions about bibtex

What is a citation key?

The short label after the entry type — okonkwo2021framing — that you pass to \cite{}. Keep the scheme consistent and stable, because renaming a key means finding every citation that used it.

Why is my title lowercased in the bibliography?

Many BibTeX styles apply sentence case. Protect words that must keep their capitals by wrapping them in braces inside the title field.

Can I use BibTeX outside LaTeX?

The .bib format is plain text, so most reference managers import and export it. Formatting a bibliography from it, though, is a LaTeX toolchain job.

Related terms

Citation style

Every citation style — APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Vancouver, Harvard — is a published rulebook governing how you signal a source in the text and format it in the reference list: punctuation, author order, italics, date placement.

Bibliography

A bibliography lists, alphabetically at the end of a paper, every source you consulted — whether or not each one is cited in the text.

DOI

Publishers assign a DOI — a Digital Object Identifier — to an article, dataset, or preprint as a permanent alphanumeric handle that resolves to the work’s current location.

In-text citation

Every borrowed idea in a paper carries an in-text citation: a brief marker — usually an author name plus a year, page, or number — that points to the full entry in your reference list.

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