MiKTeX and proTeXt ⇒ adding bibliography

[me_here_me]

Hi
I am trying to add bibliography to my file and its giving an error. following is the related source:

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\bibliographystyle{plain}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{VC}

and VC file is:

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\begin{thebibliography}{99}
.. some references
\end{thebibliography}

I am getting an error complaining about a missing \item and referring to "\end{thebibliography}"

whats wrong or missing in the above code?

regards

[gmedina]

You are mixing the two standard ways used to create bibliographies. When you use

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\bibliographystyle{plain}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{VC}

LaTeX (BIBTeX) is expecting your bibliographical items to be in a .bib database. But your VC file is something different; it has the form of a manually created bibliography. So, two possibilities:
1) If your bibliography is in the file VC (with extension .tex), use \include{VC} in your main .tex file and suppress the lines

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\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{VC}

However, you loose the possibility to use all the power of BIBTeX to, for example, easily change the style of your bibliography.
2) Modify your VC file to convert it to a proper .bib file and then use in your main .tex document

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\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{VC}

Now you must process your document in the following way:
(pdf)latex document.tex
bibtex document
(pdf)latex document.tex
(pdf)latex document.tex
Here you can find information about BIBTeX and examples of .bib databases.

Edit: I think this thread belongs to LaTeX->General since it's about a problem not directly related to MiKTeX

[me_here_me]

thanks for the help