BibTeX, biblatex and biber ⇒ Oscola bibliography not finding references

[NiallNixon]

Hi all,

I've been using LaTeX for quite some years now but only for engineering papers/articles. Now a friend of mine (Law major) is trying to learn how to use it but is having some trouble with their citation method. In law they apparently often use Oscola (https://www.ctan.org/pkg/oscola?lang=en) and this is what seems to be giving the problem. My references are undefined for some reason...

While creating our own documents we ran into problems but even using the example (oscola.tex) in the package example seems to give the same result. See the image below where the output (top is from my output, bottom from example pdf) is slightly different but the references (at least 1, 2 and 3) should be the same.

The correct way:


My output:


Another example (and proof that something fishy is going on) is here on this forum: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... tion-style. The author says it should look like:


But my output is:


I tried all the usual:
1. pdflatex, bibtex, pdflatex, pdflatex
2. Deleting all build files
3. Running just bibtex file with different editor
...

Can anyone tip me as to what is going wrong here?
I'm using Texmaker 4.4.1 and MikTex 2.9.

[Johannes_B]

oscola is a biblatex style and you have to call biber instead of bibtex. You have not shown any code so i can't be sure though.

How to use biber with my editor?

[NiallNixon]

The code was in the link as it was an example of someone else. Here is the code for the second snippit in my starting post:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt, letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[style=oscola, ibidstyle=uc, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\usepackage[style=british]{csquotes}
\bibliography{example.bib}

\begin{document}
Example\footcite{housen2002}, another\footcite[3]{housen2002}, one more\footcite{crestonmoly2014}, again\footcite[45]{housen2002}, and again\footcite[45]{housen2002}.
\end{document}

So to answer your question, yes I'm using biber.

[Johannes_B]

Buddy, you are not. You are instructing package biblatex to set up everything for the use of biber. But you are calling bibtex as you are saying yourself.

By the way, it should be \addbibresource{<nameOfTheFile>.bib}. The command used in the questin (not answer) is deprecated.

Can you show us the blg-file?

[NiallNixon]

Ah I see what you mean, sorry. I'm not as familiar with the workings of bibliographies as I could be. Normally, with non-oscola style citations, it just works. To me it is strange though that a tex file produces totally different output on my system then on the poster of the tex file in question.

Here is my .blg file:

This is BibTeX, Version 0.99dThe top-level auxiliary file: build\test2.aux
I found no \citation commands---while reading file build\test2.aux
I found no \bibdata command---while reading file build\test2.aux
I found no \bibstyle command---while reading file build\test2.aux
(There were 3 error messages)

[Johannes_B]

See, this is BibTeX. You need to cal biber.

How do i call biber with my editor?

[NiallNixon]

Thanks again. Getting somewhere now, at least it's finding the references. The output of the .blg file is now:

[0] Config.pm:318> INFO - This is Biber 1.8
[1] Config.pm:321> INFO - Logfile is 'test2.blg'
[143] biber-MSWIN:272> INFO - === %a %b %e, %Y, %H:%M:%S
[144] Biber.pm:333> INFO - Reading 'test2.bcf'
[264] Utils.pm:169> WARN - Warning: Found biblatex control file version 2.7, expected version 2.5
[265] Biber.pm:630> INFO - Found 2 citekeys in bib section 0
[293] Biber.pm:3053> INFO - Processing section 0
[323] Biber.pm:3190> INFO - Looking for bibtex format file 'example.bib' for section 0
[325] bibtex.pm:812> INFO - Found BibTeX data source 'example.bib'

Besides the fact that the pdf now doesn't appear automatically in texmaker, if I open it, the references are still bold and not written full (just the bold citation key).

[Johannes_B]

Your versions of biblatex and biber aren't matching. Please update your TeX-distribution. If you are running MikTeX, do it in user and admin mode.

Don't forget to make the latex-run at the end.

[NiallNixon]

The update seemed to finally do it, thanks again for all that, cheers!