- What is the LaTeX Bibliography Styles Database?
- LaTeX is a professional document preparation system. It allows the insertion of bibliographic references through a companion program called BibTeX. The couple LaTeX+BibTeX is very efficient in producing high quality reports and articles. Nevertheless, formatting of the references is still difficult because of the very specific needs of each journal. It requires to link a style file (in
bst or sometimes sty formats) to your LaTeX document. This database is a community effort to store this kind of files for some journals (hopefully many) in a common place in order to avoid you the need to write them.
- Is it free?
- Yes, LaTeX, BibTeX and this database are free.
- Who made it?
- I, Jean-Olivier Irisson, started it. As a PhD student in France, I needed something like this. I was a complete PHP/MySQL newbie so my friend Eric Falconnier helped me with that. But expanding the database is now up to you.
- I want to write an article for journal X. How can I get the associated style(s)?
- Just search the database with the name of your journal. If the name does not show up, please consider helping us to add it to the database.
- How do I use a bst file?
- In your LaTeX document, insert the lines:
\bibliography{/path/to/your/bib_file}
\bibliographystyle{name_of_the_bst_file}
before \end{document}. Please note that neither the .bib extension of the bibtex file nor the .bst extension of the style file have to be written.
- How do I use a sty file?
- In your LaTeX document, insert the line:
\usepackage{name_of_the_sty_file}
before \begin{document}. Here also the .sty extension has to be omitted.
- How do I use a cls file?
- At the complete top of your LaTeX document, insert the line:
\documentclass{name_of_the_cls_file}
Here again the .cls extension has to be omitted.
- It is said that my style file is for use with natbib (or amsrefs, or jurabib or...). What does this mean?
- It means that an additional LaTeX package is necessary to use the style. You have to download the package. Natbib, AMSrefs, Jurabib and such are standard packages and are probably already in your distribution. If not, check our useful links. Then you have to insert the insert the line:
\usepackage{name_of_the_additional_file}
before \begin{document}, omitting the .sty extension.
- I downloaded a style and I am not happy with it: it is not exactly what journal X wants. Who do I blame?
- This database is build by the contributions of many people, spending part of their time creating style files. All of them are probably not perfect. Some comments associated with the style can help you improve its output. If this does not suffice, you can email the author of the style when the address is available and ask him/her (kindly) to improve it in regard of your problems. Nonetheless, the more productive way to solve the problem is probably to improve the style file yourself and re-submit it here in order to help future authors of journal X. We provide more information on how to do this.
- I downloaded a style and it is a complete mess. Who do I yell at?
- Nobody. But if you really think that there is a problem with the style (if it is completely different from the journal's requirements for example) you can send a gentle email to bstdatabase@gmail.com and tell us which style is wrong.
- Where does the nice illustration in the top left corner comes from?
- This is an image found in the Open Clipart Library by searching with the keyword "book". The Open Clipart Library provides free of charge, patent free, painful-licenses-free images. This one was release under a Creative Commons license.
