BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Bibtex / Creating a bibliography (major confusion)

[cordeliawl]

I'm writing a thesis and I'm doing fine with the rest of the LaTex for the most part but I can't figure out how to make my bibliography work. Here's what I'm doing, perhaps you can tell me what part of it is profoundly wrong.

Here is my (abridged) thesis code:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{reedthesis}
\usepackage{graphicx,latexsym} 
\usepackage{amssymb,amsthm,amsmath}
\usepackage{longtable,booktabs,setspace} 
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{natbib}

\begin{document}
  \nocite{*}   % I was told to put this in to include items not cited in the thesis
  \bibliographystyle{plain}
  \bibliography{thesis}
\end{document}

Then I have in the same folder a file called thesis.bbl, it looks like this:

Code: Select all

@Book{Beardon
AUTHOR = "Beardon, Alan F.",
TITLE="The Geometry of Discrete Groups",
PUBLISHER="Springer-Verlag",
YEAR = 1983
}

@BOOK{Martin
AUTHOR="Martin, George E."
TITLE="The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane"
PUBLISHER="Springer-Verlag"
YEAR="1982"
}

@BOOK{Rosenfeld
AUTHOR="Rosenfeld, B.A."
TITLE="A History of Non-Euclidean Geometry"
PUBLISHER="Springer-Verlag"
YEAR="1988"
}

@BOOK{Trudeau
AUTHOR="Trudeau, Richard J."
TITLE="The Non-Euclidean Revolution"
PUBLISHER="Birkh\"{a}user"
YEAR="1987"
}

@BOOK{Stahl
AUTHOR="Stahl, Saul"
TITLE="The Poincar\'{e} Half-Plane"
PUBLISHER="Jones and Bartlett"
YEAR="1993"
}

When I build the Tex file everything comes out fine except the bibliography looks like this:

@BOOKBeardon AUTHOR = "Beardon, Alan F." TITLE = ... (and so on)

I'm obviously missing a major step. I'm very confused, sorry if this is an extremely stupid question but I'd be greatly appreciated to anyone who could help me out.

Thanks,
Cordelia

[josephwright]

The file should be called "thesis.bib". After running "latex thesis", do "bibtex thesis", before "latex thesis" again twice. What happens is BibTeX creates a .bbl file from the .bib file and the citations in your LaTeX source. LaTeX then uses the .bbl file as the bibliography.

[cordeliawl]

So I tried the above and now my bibliography page is just blank. Any thoughts?

Thanks to everyone for you help

Cordelia

[localghost]

You are using a non-standard document class which is not available on CTAN. Give a link where to find it or attach it to your next post. This gives us the opportunity to do some testing.


Best regards
Thorsten

[cordeliawl]

This is the document class I am using, it was created by the school for uniform thesis format.

[localghost]

At first I overlooked that but your trouble is entirely caused by your bibliography database file. Some causes are obvious, some not. In particular

• you forgot to end the lines for the citation keys and the single fields with a comma as separator.
• you have to group the commands for special foreign language characters with an additional pair of curly braces.

According to this list, modify your database file as follows.

Code: Select all

@BOOK{Beardon,
AUTHOR = "Beardon, Alan F.",
TITLE="The Geometry of Discrete Groups",
PUBLISHER="Springer-Verlag",
YEAR="1983"
}

@BOOK{Martin,
AUTHOR="Martin, George E.",
TITLE="The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane",
PUBLISHER="Springer-Verlag",
YEAR="1982"
}

@BOOK{Rosenfeld,
AUTHOR="Rosenfeld, B.A.",
TITLE="A History of Non-Euclidean Geometry",
PUBLISHER="Springer-Verlag",
YEAR="1988"
}

@BOOK{Trudeau,
AUTHOR="Trudeau, Richard J.",
TITLE="The Non-Euclidean Revolution",
PUBLISHER="Birkh{\"a}user",
YEAR="1987"
}

@BOOK{Stahl,
AUTHOR="Stahl, Saul",
TITLE="The Poincar{\'e} Half-Plane",
PUBLISHER="Jones and Bartlett",
YEAR="1993"
}

As an additional advice let me tell you that you can write the author names as usual and let BibTeX do the final formatting by choosing an appropriate bibliography style. Its manual and the one of natbib will tell you more.

[cordeliawl]

Works now! Thank you so much localghost and josephwright! You have no idea how helpful that was.

--Cordelia