LaTeX Resources for Graduate Students: BibTeX command

The BibTeX  reference management software associated with LaTeX can be used to select references from the .bib file database to be included in the bibliography section (reference list) of a manuscript.

For this purpose BibTeX consults the .aux file associated with an earlier version of the LaTeX manuscript .Besides citations BibTeX also looks for the name of the .bst file that tells BibTeX how to format the references.The .aux file itself is generated/updated by executing the command latex manuscript.

Running BibTeX on the manuscript file, by using the command bibtex manuscript,  results in a manuscript.bbl (bibliography) file that can be included as the bibliography section (reference list) of the LaTeX manuscript. This can be done by cutting and pasting the entire .bbl file at the appropriate location, or by renaming the .bbl file into e.g. bibliography.tex and including it in the manuscript using the /include{bibliography} LaTeX command.