Creating a bibliography

Scientific documents in particular commonly contain a list of references or a bibliography. We will work out how to typeset a bibliography and how to refer to its entries.

Using LaTeX's standard features, we will create a small list of references containing a book and an article by Donald E. Knuth, the creator of TeX. In our body text, we will refer to both:

1. Create a new document as follows:

   \documentclass{article}
   \begin{document}
   \section*{Recommended texts}
   To study \TeX\ in depth, see \cite{DK86}.
   For writing math texts, see \cite{DK89}.
   \begin{thebibliography}{8}
   \bibitem{DK86} D.E. Knuth, \emph{The {\TeX}book}, 1986
   \bibitem{DK89} D.E. Knuth, \emph{Typesetting Concrete
   Mathematics}, 1989
   \end{thebibliography}
   \end{document}

2. Click on Typeset and examine the output:

Figure 8.6 – A list of references

We used an environment called thebibliography to typeset the list of references, which is similar to a...