latex bibliography style thesis

LaTeX-Tutorial.com

Bibliography in latex with bibtex/biblatex, learn how to create a bibliography with bibtex and biblatex in a few simple steps. create references / citations and autogenerate footnotes., creating a .bib file, using bibtex.

• Autogenerate footnotes with BibLaTeX
• BibTeX Format

BibTeX Styles

• New Post! Export Bibliographic Database (BibTeX) Entries from Online Databases

We have looked at many features of LaTeX so far and learned that many things are automated by LaTeX. There are functions to add a table of contents, lists of tables and figures and also several packages that allow us to generate a bibliography. I will describe how to use bibtex and biblatex (both external programs) to create the bibliography. At first we have to create a .bib file, which contains our bibliographic information.

A .bib file will contain the bibliographic information of our document. I will only give a simple example, since there are many tools to generate the entries automatically. I will not explain the structure of the file itself at this point, since i suggest using a bibtex generator (choose one from google). Our example will contain a single book and look like this:

If you don’t want to use a BibTeX generator or a reference management tool like Citavi (which generates BibTeX files automatically for you), you can find more examples of BibTeX formats here.

After creating the bibtex file, we have to tell LaTeX where to find our bibliographic database. For BibTeX this is not much different from printing the table of contents. We just need the commands \bibliography  which tells LaTeX the location of our .bib file and \bibliographystyle which selects one of various bibliographic styles.

By using this code, we will obtain something like this:

I named my .bib file lesson7a1.bib, note that I did not enter the .bib extension. For the style, I’ve choosen the ieeetr style, which is very common for my subject, but there are many more styles available. Which will change the way our references look like. The ieeetr style will mark citations with successive numbers such as [1] in this example. If I choose the style to apalike instead, i will get the following result:

Most editors will let you select, to run bibtex automatically on compilation. In TeXworks (MiKTeX) for example, this should be selected by default.

If you use a different editor, it can be necessary to execute the bibtex command manually. In a command prompt/shell simply run:

It is necessary to execute the pdflatex command, before the bibtex command, to tell bibtex what literature we cited in our paper. Afterwards the .bib file will be translated into the proper output for out references section. The next two steps merge the reference section with our LaTeX document and then assign successive numbers in the last step.

Autogenerate footnotes in \(\LaTeX\) using BibLaTeX

The abilities of BibTeX are limited to basic styles as depicted in the examples shown above. Sometimes it is necessary to cite all literature in footnotes and maintaining all of them by hand can be a frustrating task. At this point BibLaTeX kicks in and does the work for us. The syntax varies a bit from the first document. We now have to include the biblatex package and use the \autocite and \printbibliography  command. It is crucial to move the \bibliography{lesson7a1} statement to the preamble of our document:

The \autocite command generates the footnotes and we can enter a page number in the brackets \autocite[1]{DUMMY:1} will generate a footnote like this:

For BibLaTeX we have to choose the citation style on package inclusion with:

The backend=bibtex  part makes sure to use BibTeX instead of Biber as our backend, since Biber fails to work in some editors like TeXworks. It took me a while to figure out how to generate footnotes automatically, because the sources I found on the internet, didn’t mention this at all.

BibTeX Formats

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of BibTeX formats, but rather give you an idea of how to cite various sources properly. If you’re interested in an extensive overview of all BibTeX formats, I suggest you to check out the resources on Wikibooks.

Inbook (specific pages)

This is a list of the formats that I have most commonly used. If you think some important format is missing here, please let me know.

Here’s a quick overview of some popular styles to use with BibTeX.

I’m trying to keep this list updated with other commonly used styles. If you’re missing something here, please let me know.

• Generate a bibliography with BibTeX and BibLaTeX
• First define a .bib file using: \bibliography{BIB_FILE_NAME} (do not add .bib)
• For BibTeX put the \bibliography statement in your document , for BibLaTeX in the preamble
• BibTeX  uses the \bibliographystyle command to set the citation style
• BibLaTeX chooses the style as an option like:  \usepackage[backend=bibtex, style=verbose-trad2]{biblatex}
• BibTeX uses the \cite command, while BibLaTeX uses the \autocite command
• The \autocite command takes the page number as an option: \autocite[NUM]{}

Next Lesson: 08 Footnotes

• Basic remarks
• Bitmap fonts
• Page layout

Bibliography

• Footnote citing

Tips on Writing a Thesis in LaTeX

A typical scientific document contains a number of references, and this leads to the problem of organizing and presentation of the references in the document. The problem can be subdivided into several parts: store of the reference information, later retrieval of this information while preparing the document, and presentation (formatting) of the reference information in the document and in the bibliography according to a particular format.

A widely-used approach to deal with references in LaTeX documents is to employ BibTeX reference management software. In BibTeX reference information is stored in format-independent plain text file(s) (usually with .bib extension), which can be modified with almost any text editor. Such a text file contains BibTeX entries , and each entry, formed by several text lines, has

• unique ID or key , needed to identify and refer to the particular entry, for instance Author2001 ;
• entry type , which can be article , book , thesis , etc.;
• entry fields (such as year , publisher , journal , etc.), corresponding to the particular type.

Here is an example of the article type entry from the .bib file I used while typesetting thesis:

The command \bibliography { reference_list } placed before \begin { document } is used to specify a plain text input file ( reference_list.bib here) containing information on references.

References can be "cited" during editing the LaTeX document using, for example, \cite { key } command, and later at the document compilation step LaTeX input files must be processed with LaTeX and BibTeX .

The most popular approaches to indicate a reference appearing in the text can be classified as "numeric" and "author–year". The former uses sequential number of a reference in the document

while "author–year" is based on the extended reference information and may appear like this:

Each indication has particular advantages and drawbacks. For example, numeric is more compact (i.e., require less space in a text line), and a group of references can be "compressed" into a range in the case they have sequential numbering (i.e., [1,2,3,5] will be shown as [1–3,5]). On the other hand, author–year indication shows more information on the cited document (typically, first one or two author names, and a year of a publication), but requires more space compared to the numeric one. The space consumed by reference may become important if your document has high density of references (and you care about in-line space "wasted" by references :).

In my thesis I have decided to use "numeric" indication, but contrary to the example above reference numbers appear in the text as a footnote: reference number by itself has script size ,

and each number has associated script-sized text at the bottom of the page (where the reference appeared) containing extended information on the cited reference:

This citation scheme improves in-line space saving compared to the plain numeric indication due to the reduced size of numbers, and at the same time allows the reader to see what exactly was cited without looking in the bibliography (which is typically located at the end of a document or chapter). The drawback of the footnote citation scheme follows from the space consumed at the bottom of the page: if there are too many citations on the page, footnote text will occupy a lot of space. For example:

To create citations in my thesis, I employed the biblatex package, which is one of the most notable packages I have used with LaTeX. The package provides a highly customizable interface for the creation and edit of the presentation of bibliographic data in the document. Compared to the plain BibTeX, biblatex enables relatively easy customization of the appearance of bibliographic data. Below I provide customizations I used to modify the default biblatex output. The detailed description of the biblatex commands is available in the package documentation .

The two basic commands to enable biblatex and output citation list are

While preparing the thesis I activated biblatex with the following options compiling the document using biblatex with the options below will need custom-numeric-comp.bbx and custom-numeric-comp.cbx files (see next sections, "Biblatex customization" and "Footnote citation") :

Option hyperref=true was specified to transform various citation elements (like citation number, page number where citation appears, hyperlink to the web page where cited document can be found, etc.) into clickable hyperlinks. This option requires hyperref package (see also notes on hyperref ).

With options url=false,isbn=false I disabled printing the URLs and ISBNs in the bibliography.

Back references

Option backref=true enables generation of the back references to the citation, which are usually number(s) of the page where citation appears:

The back reference text preceding the page number ("see p.") can be modified using the following command:

Just a note on the back references. When you are reading a .pdf document, encounter a reference, and click on it, .pdf viewer will change view to the record of this reference in the bibliography. Now, if you want to return to the main text and continue reading, you may find it difficult to do using back reference when the reference was cited on several pages (back reference will contain several page numbers and you have to bear in mind the original page number you came to the bibliography), and a good solution here is to use " Alt + ← " instead of the back reference itself. On the other hand, back references are useful to indicate how often and where a particular reference was cited in the document.

Citation style

Option style=custom-numeric-comp determines the citation style. As seen from its name, the chosen citation style uses numbers ( numeric ) to indicate citations in text, and consequent numbers are compressed ( comp ) into a range: [1,2,3,5] is printed as [1–3,5]. Above it was mentioned that I used footnote version of the standard biblatex numeric-comp style — as a result, each citation has i) its number typeset as superscript, and ii) short and extended reference information located at the bottom of the page ("footnote text") and in the bibliography, respectively:

Option citereset=chapter defines biblatex behavior for the reference footnote text in a typical situation when a citation appears several times in the document: footnote text for the particular citation is printed only once per document chapter ( citereset=chapter ), where chapter is defined according to the LaTeX sectioning commands . In my thesis a typical chapter includes about 20 pages, and I assumed citereset=chapter to be quite acceptable. However, one of my colleagues was confused by such a rule for printing the footnote text (i.e., he did not get the logic behind the rule until I have explained it). I was thinking about resetting footnote text as "once-per-page" (not "once-per-chapter") but decided to avoid this due to high density of the references in my thesis. If you are interested in such a behavior some useful information can be found here .

Number of displayed author names

Options maxcitenames=3 and maxbibnames=100 limit number of authors of the cited document to be printed in the document body and in the bibliography, respectively. If the number of authors exceeds maxcite(bib)names , the author list is truncated according to biblatex settings, and usually printed as "Author1 et al." In my case I have very short authors lists in the footnote text (document body) to reduce space occupied by footnote citations,

and virtually all authors are displayed in the bibliography:

I note that I have prepared my thesis with biblatex v. 0.9a (19.03.2010), while this on-line document was prepared and tested on biblatex v. 1.6 (29.07.2011). Options maxcitenames and maxbibnames were not available in v. 0.9a, and the described biblatex behavior (with maxcitenames=3 and maxbibnames=100 ) was obtained using maxnames=3 while loading the biblatex package, and maxnames=100 while printing the bibliography, i.e.

The next section continues the discussion of the biblatex customization.

• Getting Started
• Basics of a LaTeX File
• Installing LaTeX & Editors
• Thesis/Dissertation Template
• Thesis & Dissertation Troubleshooting
• Bibliography with BIbTeX

Create a Bibliography

Example command:

\bibliographystyle{plain} \usepackage{plain}

The \bibliographystyle command tells LaTEX which style to use for the bibliography. The bibliography style called <style>, is defined in the file <style>.bst. This example demonstrates how you use the \bibliographystyle command to select a bibliography style called plain. While not required, it is a good idea to put the \bibliographystyle command in the preamble of your document. The bibliography style plain requires the additional package plain, which explains why the additional command \usepackage{plain} is used in the example.

End-of-Chapter Bibliographies

1. Import biblatex with your favourite options

\usepackage[<options>]{biblatex}

2. Specify the names of your bibliography database(s).

\addbibresource{<your .bib file names>}

3. Add a refsection environment for each chapter and print the bibliography at the end of the chapter.

\chapter{From K\"onigsberg to G\"ottingen} \begin{refsection} … % Lots of text and citations omitted. \printbibliography[heading=subbibliography] \end{refsection}

4. Run latex on your LaTEX source file. This will create an auxiliary file for each refsection with a \printbibligraphy command in it. The names of theses auxiliary files are of the form <base name><number>- blx.aux, where <base name> is the base name of your main document.

5. Run bibtex on each auxiliary file. 

6. Run LaTEX twice.

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The 14 BibTeX entry types

Possibly the most difficult aspect of using BibTeX to manage bibliographies is deciding what entry type to use for a reference source. We list all the 14 BibTeX entry types including their description on when to use.

An article from a journal, magazine, newspaper, or periodical.

A book where the publisher is clearly identifiable.

A printed work that is bound, but does not have a clearly identifiable publisher or supporting institution.

An article that has been included in conference proceedings. See inproceedings for details.

A section, such as a chapter, or a page range within a book.

• incollection

A titled section of a book. Such as a short story within the larger collection of short stories that make up the book.

• inproceedings

A paper that has been published in conference proceedings. The usage of conference and inproceedings is the same. The conference entry was included for Scribe compatibility.

A technical manual for a machine software such as would come with a purchase to explain operation to the new owner.

• mastersthesis

A thesis written for the Master’s level degree.

Used if none of the other entry types quite match the source. Frequently used to cite web pages, but can be anything from lecture slides to personal notes.

A thesis written for the PhD level degree.

• proceedings

A conference proceeding.

An institutionally published report such as a report from a school, a government organization, an organization, or a company. This entry type is also frequently used for white papers and working papers.

• unpublished

A document that has not been officially published such as a paper draft or manuscript in preparation.

Information Technology

LaTeX Your Thesis

General thesis tips, about the thesis template, changing headers, using and modifying sections, handling images and tables, landscape orientation, managing paragraph spacing, uploading the thesis template to overleaf, add a collaborator, managing your bibliography, choosing a bibliography style, how to cite a reed thesis, changing the title of your bibliography, fragment your thesis with \include, using labels and references, adding appendices, including full page pdfs.

• Additional Resources - LaTeX Cheat Sheet
• BACK UP YOUR THESIS. Often you will not realize for days or weeks that important paragraph or page is missing. Make recovery as easy as possible by keeping a dated backup of each writing session. Then copy those backups to at least two locations other than your hard drive: your home server, Gmail account, thumb drive, the options are wide and numerous. There is no excuse for not backing up the most important document of your Reed career.
• Start your bibliographic database the day you start reading. Keep it up to date and annotate it, so you know where it came from (library, Summit, ILL, public library, professor), whether you've read it, and where you want to cite it. This will make the writing process less frustrating and creating the bibliography seamless.
• Think of thesis formatting as a form of productive procrastination. Please don't put it off until the last week.
• BACK UP. No, seriously. It's not "if" your hard drive fails, it's "when." Not to scare you or anything, but it's a good habit, like buckling your seat belt or not leaving your laptop unattended. You really don't want to wish you had taken that small precaution.
• Keep the editable original of each graphic you want to include in your thesis in one folder. Later you may need to change a graphic quickly and having the editable original makes it easy. For graphs, keep the original Excel/JMP/Stata document, not a PDF. For photographs, keep a high resolution copy (such as a tiff). For drawings and illustrations, keep the original Illustrator document.
• Use the timesaving benefits of LaTeX from the first day. Cross references can refer to tables, graphics, and chapters so you do not have to update references as your thesis changes. Use comments to make notes about what needs to added or changed.
• Enjoy the experience! And get some sleep, food and relaxation on occasion. Hundreds of people did this before you; you can do this too.

The thesis template, available for download here , contains two main files of importance: Reedthesis.cls and Thesis.tex . (As you noticed, there are many other files in the folder. For more information about all the files LaTeX creates, see our article on the subject. ) Reedthesis.cls is a document class like article or book, and so must be defined in the preamble (see the section about document classes for more info ). Additionally, since the average installation (even Reed's) does not include Reedthesis.cls, you will have to bring the file wherever you want to work on your thesis.

The thesis template folder also contains bonus materials you may find helpful, such as an array of bibliography style files (.bst) that can support an undergraduate thesis citation and files already modified to work with a psychology major's specific needs. So make sure that you have the latest version of the thesis template and read through the thesis.tex file for more complete overview of the template's contents.

Common Queries

While the content of your thesis is certainly much more important than the appearance, a nicely typeset thesis will be more pleasant to look upon ten years from now. We have collected nearly every query for the last few years so you can make the changes you want and get back to revising your latest chapter. That typo on the first page will bug you even more than the headers once the thesis is bound and in the library. Most of these answers are links that lead to other pages in our LaTeX documentation because they fit well elsewhere and this page would be much too long if we decided to be redundant.

If you don't like how your headers appear, you can change them. That is, they are modifiable in LaTeX, but your adviser or the library might not like the change. But people change how they look all the time (usually to have the name of the chapter in small caps and without the title of the current \section), so the advanced LaTeX page has a few ways to go about tweaking the headers .

When using Reedthesis.cls, you will use \chapter{ optional title here } to denote the beginning of a new chapter (obviously) while \section{ title } and \subsection{ title } will subdivide those chapters. You do not need to use \subsection if you don't wish to, but \section will probably prove very useful to break up your chapters.

If you don't like the automatic numbering of \chapter, \section and \subsection, you can easily eliminate the numbering by adding an asterix to the command ( \chapter*{ title }, \section*{ title } , etc.), but then the section won't show up in the Table of Contents. To learn how to make sure these show up in the ToC, and to learn more about sectioning commands in general, check out the advanced LaTeX page .

In order to add an image in LaTeX, you must use the package graphicx and place the image ( \includegraphics{ imagename } ) inside the figure environment. Be sure to give a caption if necessary, but remember that LaTeX will add the "Figure x.x" to your caption on the typeset document. For more information on handling images, including the answers to our most common questions, see our graphics documentation . To make your life easier, I highly suggest that you read the section on using references and labels .

Like figures, tables also need to be in a float environment such as tabular or longtable . For an introduction to tables or to learn how to do more complex table formatting, see our documentation on tables . To learn how to change their position, numbering or presentation, the graphics documentation covers the same material. You may have to replace figure with table wherever appropriate, but the commands are basically the same. Feel free to stop by the CUS desk or try Google if you get lost!

When you have a table or figure that is too wide for your page, you will need to rotate your page to be in landscape rather than portrait orientation. To avoid rotating your headers and footers as well, use the package lscape (for more information on packages, see the advanced LaTeX section ) and enclose whatever needs to be rotated in the landscape environment:

\begin{landscape} \begin{figure}[htbp] \caption{A Really Wide Figure} \includegraphics{panoramicimage} \label{pan} \end{figure} \end{landscape}

This will keep the headers and page numbers in the portrait orientation, but rotate your figure or table as well as the appropriate caption. You do not want to use the package Portland ; this rotates the headers and footers as well, and the registrar will probably not accept such a setup.

The line breaking and spacing algorithms of LaTeX are not always successful. Sometimes the space between paragraphs is inconsistent from page to page, or even within the same page. If this happens to you, try ignoring it for a bit and continue to write your paper. Often the addition of a new subsection or just more words will be reorganized into a more pleasing arrangement.

But don't add unnecessary bulk to your thesis just to make it look good. Try putting this in the preamble: \setlength{\parskip}{0pt} . This sets the inter-paragraph spacing to 0 pts. You could also tell LaTeX that it can be more permissive when placing page breaks by putting \allowdisplaybreaks or \raggedbottom in the preamble. If none of these solutions work and you don't want to add more content to your finished chapter, bring your .tex file to the CUS desk and we shall see what we can do.

Using Overleaf

Overleaf is an online LaTeX editor that allows one to use LaTeX software without downloading or configuring. It has a variety of templates, but can also be used to make changes on our thesis template. 

• Download the LaTeX template .zip file from the Thesis Templates section at downloads.reed.edu
• Go to overleaf.com and create an account. We recommend using personal credentials so you don’t lose any data after graduation. Note: If you have a subscription through Reed you’ll have to use your Reed credentials instead

• Select template .zip file from your computer and click Upload  if prompted.
• Using the template is the same as with any LaTeX compiler  
• Thesis edits should be made to thesis.tex, and a live version can be viewed by clicking Recompile . You can also upload your own .bib file to your project instead of using the example prelim.bib .

You can add your adviser as a collaborator so they may leave comments on your work as you go. Without a subscription you can have a single collaborator, with a student subscription you can have up to 6. If you are interested in joining our pilot subscription program, inquire by emailing [email protected] .

• Open your project.

Bibliographies

Unless you are doing a creative writing thesis, you will read way too much for your thesis. As a result, your bibliography will be ridiculously long. Thankfully, there is this great program called BibTeX that will typeset your bibliography for you. For more general information on using BibTeX to create your bibliography, as well as choosing a bibliography format and using a bibliography manager, see our BibTeX documentation .

While it is possible to create a bibliography manually , and there are reasons to do so, your senior year will be made a bit easier if you take advantage of BibTeX's automation . We strongly suggest that you use an application such as JabRef or BibDesk , both of which have documentation on the BibTex page. 

The BibTeX page has the following advice for creating your bibliography in BibTeX, but I thought it was worth repeating here:

• Like with thesis formatting, the sooner you start compiling your bibliography for something as large as thesis, the better. Typing in source after source is mind-numbing enough; do you really want to do it for hours on end in late April? Think of it as procrastination.
• When you have more than one author or editor, you need to separate each author's name by the word and .
• The cite key (a citation's label) needs to be unique from the other entries.
• Bibliographies made using BibTeX (whether manually or using a manager) accept LaTeX markup, so you can italicize and add symbols as necessary.
• To force capitalization in an article title or where all lowercase is generally used, bracket the capital letter in curly braces.
• You can add a Reed Thesis citation option. In fact, your bibliography style (.bst) may already have the option. See the thesis template for more details.

If you know what bibliography style you need to be using (Chicago or MLA, for example), then you should check out the available bibliography styles on the page about BibTeX styles . If your discipline varies with regard to preferred bibliography style, ask your adviser which format or journal you should use, then check out the BibTeX style page for a Reed edition, or CTAN.org for most other styles. 

A normal bibliography style (.bst) has formats for a PhD thesis and a Master's thesis, but no preset format for an undergraduate thesis. In your .bib file, use the Phd. thesis entry type, and in the optional type field, enter "Reed thesis" or "Undergraduate thesis" and that will be displayed instead of "Phd.thesis".

The default bibliography title is just "Bibliography," but if you want to change this, LaTeX gives you an easy way to do so. Here is an example of a bibliography renamed to "Works Cited." Note the placement after the command \backmatter and before the commands that make the bibliography ( \bibliographystyle and \bibliography ).

\backmatter \renewcommand{\bibname}{ Works Cited } \bibliographystyle{plain} \bibliography{thesis}

Special Topics In Thesis: Tricks to Make Life Easier

Thesis may be scary, but putting it together doesn't have to be. A number of recent alumni answered a call for recommendations to the next crop of seniors; here are the computer related gems.

Your thesis is big, or at least it will be soon enough. Instead of typing everything into the thesis template, you can have separate files for each chapter and then include them in the thesis template. To learn more about using the commands \include and \input , see the appropriate section in the advanced LaTeX documentation.

If you've made a table or figure, you have probably noticed the command \label{default} . If you want to refer to that table or figure elsewhere in your document, you need only to write \ref{default} and your typeset document will replace that ref with the number of the item. But you can refer to more than just tables and figures with ease:

• For figures and tables, the label command should be inserted right after the \caption .
• For equations or lists, the label command should be within the environment as a whole.
• For chapters or sections, it will refer to the first preceding section title, whether it is a subsection, section, or chapter.
• If you want the page number of the reference, use the \pageref{ marker } command. If you want just the reference, use the \ref{ marker } command. For correct spacing, you may wish to precede the reference commands with a tilde (~) if you are using the reference in a sentence or text.
• You will need to typeset your document at least twice to see cross-references reflect any changes. You will know that you need to typeset again if you see question marks where there should be references.

To add an appendix to your thesis, find \appendix towards the end of your thesis template. Right after the \appendix , it should have another \chapter command, in which you can specify the name of your appendix. This is what the template has:

\appendix \chapter{The First Appendix} \chapter{The Second Appendix, For Fun}

You can either write directly in the template as if the appendix is just another chapter, or stick an external document in using \input (for .tex documents only, see the documentation on this ) or \includegraphics (for PDFs and other formats, see below). Your appendices will appear in the Table of Contents as Appendix A: Appendix Name (the second appendix will be Appendix B, and so on). The appendix itself will have both Appendix A and the appendix title on separate lines.

If you want to remove the "appendix" part of your appendix title or otherwise modify how that part of the title is displayed, remove \appendix from your thesis, thus making your appendices into normal chapters. You then need to keep the appendix from being numbered as "Chapter # ", so make the following modifications to your document:

Original: \appendix \chapter{The First Appendix} To make the appendix named Appendix: The First Appendix, change the above to: \chapter*{Appendix: The First Appendix} \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Appendix: The First Appendix} \chaptermark{Appendix} \markboth{Appendix}{Appendix}

The \chapter* creates an unnumbered chapter and \addcontentsline adds the chapter to the Table of Contents with the title you specify. The commands \chaptermark and \markboth handle the headers. For more on modifying chapter names, look at the documentation on sectioning . To learn more about changing headers, read the Headers In a Thesis section.

Music Majors: There are two LaTeX related routes to typesetting music, MusicTeX and LilyPond. However, past music seniors have struggled to incorporate the files from both programs into their theses. The official CUS recommendation is to use Finale to typeset your music, then export the sheet music to PDF. (See this page to learn how to create pdfs in a program such as Finale.) Using \includepdf (with the package PDFPages ) is a great way to add them. PDFPages is a powerful and flexible way to include multi-page PDF files in your LaTeX document. Example: \includepdf[pages=1-8 offset=15 -15,scale=.80, frame=true,pagecommand={\thispagestyle{plain}}]{Orlando.pdf}

Additional Resources

For a quick LaTeX Cheat Sheet, please visit https://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/ .

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How to selectively choose the items to output in Bibliography in Latex?

I'd like to ask about choosing item for Bibliography part in Latex.

The situation is like this: I currently use JabRef for bibliography management (great software), (engine MikTex 2.8, IDE TexnicCenter1.0). The package I use for writing thesis is ClassicThesis by Miede and Arsclassica as a support package.

in the main text file it uses natbib package to handle bibliography:

\usepackage[square,numbers,sort&compress]{natbib}

However when I copy BibTex from different authors, different publishers, they often provide various content on the paper. Some are not necessary.

For example:

This Bibtex Source (some provide in very detail like this, some give another information)

would produce:

David G. Lowe. Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. Int. J. Comput. Vision, 60:91–110, November 2004. ISSN 0920-5691. doi: 10. 1023/B:VISI.0000029664.99615.94. URL http://portal.acm.org/citation . cfm?id=993451.996342.

But I need to comply with the format required by my school, it closely follows IEEE format. With the information above, the output should be:

(author name small caps) David G. Lowe , "Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints", (italic journal name) Int. Journal of Computer Vision , Vol. 60, pp. 91–110, Nov 2004. ISSN 0920-5691

Is there a neat way to do that? I think it's very tiresome and unpractical to remove all the unnecessary information form the Bib source they provided.

• bibliography

3 Answers 3

In general, the bibliography style file (.bst) controls how the fields present in the .bib file are presented, including which are omitted. While hand-editing those files is almost hopeless, the custom-bib package can help you create a style file that suits your requirements. Alternatively, many bst files have already been created - maybe somebody has one for your school.

• The link is dead: The re­quested URL /tex-archive/help/Cat­a­logue/en­tries/cus­tom-bib.html was not found on this server. –  Milos Commented May 13, 2019 at 15:19
• @Milos I fixed the link –  Aniko Commented May 17, 2019 at 19:13

Check the bibtool preprocessor for BibTeX: it will let you specify in a configuration file how to process your bibliography including operaitons such as adding and deleting fields, selecting regexps, etc. To obtained detailed formatting corresponding to the IEEE format, you may have to move away from natbib, and use the official IEEE bibliographic format . BibTeX can naturally be configured for that .

• Thanks! I will check these links out! –  Jim Raynor Commented Dec 27, 2010 at 11:48
• 1 No problem. Don't hesitate to vote, or accept an answer if they turn out to help you. –  Francois G Commented Dec 27, 2010 at 16:47

Thanks! I finally found an answer to my problem. There are actually IEEE style package for controlling the output bibliography. I first tried IEEEtr style (standard LaTex style for IEEE) but everything messed up. For those who use natbib package, you should run with IEEEtranN (or IEEEtranSN for sorted bibliography) style by Michael Shell.

actually i want a little bit more freedom by changing the style (making it "hybrid" between ACM and IEEE, and abbrev all the transaction or "International". This can be done by tweaking the .bst file but I'm fine with the current result.

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Clean Thesis is a clean, simple, and elegant LaTeX style for thesis documents.

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Clean, Simple, Elegant

Clean Thesis is a LaTeX style for thesis documents, developed for my diplom thesis (Diplomarbeit). The style can be understood as my personal compromise — a typical clean looking scientific document combined and polished with minor beautifications.

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AAAI Press Formatting Instructions for Authors Using L a T e X — A Guide

AAAI creates proceedings, working notes, and technical reports directly from electronic source furnished by the authors. To ensure that all papers in the publication have a uniform appearance, authors must adhere to the following instructions.

Introduction

Congratulations on having a paper selected for inclusion in an AAAI Press proceedings or technical report! This document details the requirements necessary to get your accepted paper published using PDF L a T e X . If you are using Microsoft Word, instructions are provided in a different document. AAAI Press does not support any other formatting software.

The instructions herein are provided as a general guide for experienced L a T e X users. If you do not know how to use L a T e X , please obtain assistance locally. AAAI cannot provide you with support and the accompanying style files are not guaranteed to work. If the results you obtain are not in accordance with the specifications you received, you must correct your source file to achieve the correct result.

These instructions are generic. Consequently, they do not include specific dates, page charges, and so forth. Please consult your specific written conference instructions for details regarding your submission. Please review the entire document for specific instructions that might apply to your particular situation. All authors must comply with the following:

You must use the 2025 AAAI Press L a T e X style file and the aaai25.bst bibliography style files, which are located in the 2025 AAAI Author Kit (aaai25.sty, aaai25.bst).

You must complete, sign, and return by the deadline the AAAI copyright form (unless directed by AAAI Press to use the AAAI Distribution License instead).

You must read and format your paper source and PDF according to the formatting instructions for authors.

You must submit your electronic files and abstract using our electronic submission form on time.

You must pay any required page or formatting charges to AAAI Press so that they are received by the deadline.

You must check your paper before submitting it, ensuring that it compiles without error, and complies with the guidelines found in the AAAI Author Kit.

All papers submitted for publication by AAAI Press must be accompanied by a valid signed copyright form. They must also contain the AAAI copyright notice at the bottom of the first page of the paper. There are no exceptions to these requirements. If you fail to provide us with a signed copyright form or disable the copyright notice, we will be unable to publish your paper. There are no exceptions to this policy. You will find a PDF version of the AAAI copyright form in the AAAI AuthorKit. Please see the specific instructions for your conference for submission details.

Formatting Requirements in Brief

We need source and PDF files that can be used in a variety of ways and can be output on a variety of devices. The design and appearance of the paper is strictly governed by the aaai style file (aaai25.sty). You must not make any changes to the aaai style file, nor use any commands, packages, style files, or macros within your own paper that alter that design, including, but not limited to spacing, floats, margins, fonts, font size, and appearance. AAAI imposes requirements on your source and PDF files that must be followed. Most of these requirements are based on our efforts to standardize conference manuscript properties and layout. All papers submitted to AAAI for publication will be recompiled for standardization purposes. Consequently, every paper submission must comply with the following requirements:

Your .tex file must compile in PDF L a T e X — (you may not include .ps or .eps figure files.)

All fonts must be embedded in the PDF file — including your figures.

Modifications to the style file, whether directly or via commands in your document may not ever be made, most especially when made in an effort to avoid extra page charges or make your paper fit in a specific number of pages.

No type 3 fonts may be used (even in illustrations).

You may not alter the spacing above and below captions, figures, headings, and subheadings.

You may not alter the font sizes of text elements, footnotes, heading elements, captions, or title information (for references and mathematics, please see the limited exceptions provided herein).

You may not alter the line spacing of text.

Your title must follow Title Case capitalization rules (not sentence case).

L a T e X documents must use the Times or Nimbus font package (you may not use Computer Modern for the text of your paper).

No L a T e X 209 documents may be used or submitted.

Your source must not require use of fonts for non-Roman alphabets within the text itself. If your paper includes symbols in other languages (such as, but not limited to, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, Russian and other Cyrillic languages), you must restrict their use to bit-mapped figures. Fonts that require non-English language support (CID and Identity-H) must be converted to outlines or 300 dpi bitmap or removed from the document (even if they are in a graphics file embedded in the document).

Two-column format in AAAI style is required for all papers.

The paper size for final submission must be US letter without exception.

The source file must exactly match the PDF.

The document margins may not be exceeded (no overfull boxes).

The number of pages and the file size must be as specified for your event.

No document may be password protected.

Neither the PDFs nor the source may contain any embedded links or bookmarks (no hyperref or navigator packages).

Your source and PDF must not have any page numbers, footers, or headers (no pagestyle commands).

Your PDF must be compatible with Acrobat 5 or higher.

Your L a T e X source file (excluding references) must consist of a single file (use of the “input” command is not allowed.

Your graphics must be sized appropriately outside of L a T e X (do not use the “clip” or “trim” command) .

If you do not follow these requirements, your paper will be returned to you to correct the deficiencies.

What Files to Submit

You must submit the following items to ensure that your paper is published:

A fully-compliant PDF file.

Your L a T e X source file submitted as a single .tex file (do not use the “input” command to include sections of your paper — every section must be in the single source file). (The only allowable exception is .bib file, which should be included separately).

The bibliography (.bib) file(s).

Your source must compile on our system, which includes only standard L a T e X 2020 TeXLive support files.

Only the graphics files used in compiling paper.

The L a T e X -generated files (e.g. .aux, .bbl file, PDF, etc.).

Your L a T e X source will be reviewed and recompiled on our system (if it does not compile, your paper will be returned to you. Do not submit your source in multiple text files. Your single L a T e X source file must include all your text, your bibliography (formatted using aaai25.bst), and any custom macros.

Your files should work without any supporting files (other than the program itself) on any computer with a standard L a T e X distribution.

Do not send files that are not actually used in the paper. Avoid including any files not needed for compiling your paper, including, for example, this instructions file, unused graphics files, style files, additional material sent for the purpose of the paper review, intermediate build files and so forth. Obsolete style files. The commands for some common packages (such as some used for algorithms), may have changed. Please be certain that you are not compiling your paper using old or obsolete style files.

Final Archive. Place your source files in a single archive which should be compressed using .zip. The final file size may not exceed 10 MB. Name your source file with the last (family) name of the first author, even if that is not you.

Using L a T e X to Format Your Paper

The latest version of the AAAI style file is available on AAAI’s website. Download this file and place it in the T e X  search path. Placing it in the same directory as the paper should also work. You must download the latest version of the complete AAAI Author Kit so that you will have the latest instruction set and style file.

Document Preamble

In the L a T e X source for your paper, you must place the following lines as shown in the example in this subsection. This command set-up is for three authors. Add or subtract author and address lines as necessary, and uncomment the portions that apply to you. In most instances, this is all you need to do to format your paper in the Times font. The helvet package will cause Helvetica to be used for sans serif. These files are part of the PSNFSS2e package, which is freely available from many Internet sites (and is often part of a standard installation).

Leave the setcounter for section number depth commented out and set at 0 unless you want to add section numbers to your paper. If you do add section numbers, you must uncomment this line and change the number to 1 (for section numbers), or 2 (for section and subsection numbers). The style file will not work properly with numbering of subsubsections, so do not use a number higher than 2.

The Following Must Appear in Your Preamble

\documentclass[letterpaper]{article} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{aaai25} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{times} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{helvet} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{courier} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage[hyphens]{url} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{graphicx} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \urlstyle{rm} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \def\UrlFont{\rm} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{graphicx} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{natbib} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \usepackage{caption} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \frenchspacing % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS \setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in} % DO NOT CHANGE THIS % % Keep the \pdfinfo as shown here. There’s no need % for you to add the /Title and /Author tags. \pdfinfo{ /TemplateVersion (2025.1) }

Preparing Your Paper

After the preamble above, you should prepare your paper as follows:

\begin{document} \maketitle \begin{abstract} %... \end{abstract}

If you want to add links to the paper’s code, dataset(s), and extended version or similar this is the place to add them, within a links environment:

\begin{links} \link{Code}{https://aaai.org/example/guidelines} \link{Datasets}{https://aaai.org/example/datasets} \link{Extended version}{https://aaai.org/example} \end{links}

You should then continue with the body of your paper. Your paper must conclude with the references, which should be inserted as follows:

% References and End of Paper % These lines must be placed at the end of your paper \bibliography{Bibliography-File} \end{document}

\begin{document}\\ \maketitle\\ ...\\ \bibliography{Bibliography-File}\\ \end{document}\\

Commands and Packages That May Not Be Used

There are a number of packages, commands, scripts, and macros that are incompatable with aaai25.sty. The common ones are listed in tables 1 and 2 . Generally, if a command, package, script, or macro alters floats, margins, fonts, sizing, linespacing, or the presentation of the references and citations, it is unacceptable. Note that negative vskip and vspace may not be used except in certain rare occurances, and may never be used around tables, figures, captions, sections, subsections, subsubsections, or references.

Page Breaks

For your final camera ready copy, you must not use any page break commands. References must flow directly after the text without breaks. Note that some conferences require references to be on a separate page during the review process. AAAI Press, however, does not require this condition for the final paper.

Paper Size, Margins, and Column Width

Papers must be formatted to print in two-column format on 8.5 x 11 inch US letter-sized paper. The margins must be exactly as follows:

Top margin: .75 inches

Left margin: .75 inches

Right margin: .75 inches

Bottom margin: 1.25 inches

The default paper size in most installations of L a T e X is A4. However, because we require that your electronic paper be formatted in US letter size, the preamble we have provided includes commands that alter the default to US letter size. Please note that using any other package to alter page size (such as, but not limited to the Geometry package) will result in your final paper being returned to you for correction.

Column Width and Margins.

To ensure maximum readability, your paper must include two columns. Each column should be 3.3 inches wide (slightly more than 3.25 inches), with a .375 inch (.952 cm) gutter of white space between the two columns. The aaai25.sty file will automatically create these columns for you.

Overlength Papers

If your paper is too long and you resort to formatting tricks to make it fit, it is quite likely that it will be returned to you. The best way to retain readability if the paper is overlength is to cut text, figures, or tables. There are a few acceptable ways to reduce paper size that don’t affect readability. First, turn on \frenchspacing, which will reduce the space after periods. Next, move all your figures and tables to the top of the page. Consider removing less important portions of a figure. If you use \centering instead of \begin{center} in your figure environment, you can also buy some space. For mathematical environments, you may reduce fontsize but not below 6.5 point .

Commands that alter page layout are forbidden. These include \columnsep, \float, \topmargin, \topskip, \textheight, \textwidth, \oddsidemargin, and \evensizemargin (this list is not exhaustive). If you alter page layout, you will be required to pay the page fee. Other commands that are questionable and may cause your paper to be rejected include \parindent, and \parskip. Commands that alter the space between sections are forbidden. The title sec package is not allowed. Regardless of the above, if your paper is obviously “squeezed” it is not going to to be accepted. Options for reducing the length of a paper include reducing the size of your graphics, cutting text, or paying the extra page charge (if it is offered).

Type Font and Size

Your paper must be formatted in Times Roman or Nimbus. We will not accept papers formatted using Computer Modern or Palatino or some other font as the text or heading typeface. Sans serif, when used, should be Courier. Use Symbol or Lucida or Computer Modern for mathematics only.

Do not use type 3 fonts for any portion of your paper, including graphics. Type 3 bitmapped fonts are designed for fixed resolution printers. Most print at 300 dpi even if the printer resolution is 1200 dpi or higher. They also often cause high resolution imagesetter devices to crash. Consequently, AAAI will not accept electronic files containing obsolete type 3 fonts. Files containing those fonts (even in graphics) will be rejected. (Authors using blackboard symbols must avoid packages that use type 3 fonts.)

Fortunately, there are effective workarounds that will prevent your file from embedding type 3 bitmapped fonts. The easiest workaround is to use the required times, helvet, and courier packages with L a T e X 2e. (Note that papers formatted in this way will still use Computer Modern for the mathematics. To make the math look good, you’ll either have to use Symbol or Lucida, or you will need to install type 1 Computer Modern fonts — for more on these fonts, see the section “Obtaining Type 1 Computer Modern.”)

If you are unsure if your paper contains type 3 fonts, view the PDF in Acrobat Reader. The Properties/Fonts window will display the font name, font type, and encoding properties of all the fonts in the document. If you are unsure if your graphics contain type 3 fonts (and they are PostScript or encapsulated PostScript documents), create PDF versions of them, and consult the properties window in Acrobat Reader.

The default size for your type must be ten-point with twelve-point leading (line spacing). Start all pages (except the first) directly under the top margin. (See the next section for instructions on formatting the title page.) Indent ten points when beginning a new paragraph, unless the paragraph begins directly below a heading or subheading.

Obtaining Type 1 Computer Modern for L a T e X .

If you use Computer Modern for the mathematics in your paper (you cannot use it for the text) you may need to download type 1 Computer fonts. They are available without charge from the American Mathematical Society: http://www.ams.org/tex/type1-fonts.html.

Nonroman Fonts.

If your paper includes symbols in other languages (such as, but not limited to, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, Russian and other Cyrillic languages), you must restrict their use to bit-mapped figures.

Title and Authors

Your title must appear centered over both text columns in sixteen-point bold type (twenty-four point leading). The title must be written in Title Case according to the Chicago Manual of Style rules. The rules are a bit involved, but in general verbs (including short verbs like be, is, using, and go), nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and pronouns should be capitalized, (including both words in hyphenated terms), while articles, conjunctions, and prepositions are lower case unless they directly follow a colon or long dash. You can use the online tool https://titlecaseconverter.com/ to double-check the proper capitalization (select the ”Chicago” style and mark the ”Show explanations” checkbox).

Author’s names should appear below the title of the paper, centered in twelve-point type (with fifteen point leading), along with affiliation(s) and complete address(es) (including electronic mail address if available) in nine-point roman type (the twelve point leading). You should begin the two-column format when you come to the abstract.

Formatting Author Information.

Author information has to be set according to the following specification depending if you have one or more than one affiliation. You may not use a table nor may you employ the \authorblk.sty package. For one or several authors from the same institution, please separate them with commas and write all affiliation directly below (one affiliation per line) using the macros \author and \affiliations:

\author{ Author 1, ..., Author n\\ } \affiliations { Address line\\ ... \\ Address line\\ }

For authors from different institutions, use \textsuperscript {\rm x } to match authors and affiliations. Notice that there should not be any spaces between the author name and the superscript (and the comma should come after the superscripts).

\author{ AuthorOne\equalcontrib\textsuperscript{\rm 1,\rm2}, AuthorTwo\equalcontrib\textsuperscript{\rm 2}, AuthorThree\textsuperscript{\rm 3},\\ AuthorFour\textsuperscript{\rm 4}, AuthorFive\textsuperscript{\rm 5}} } \affiliations { \textsuperscript{\rm 1}AffiliationOne,\\ \textsuperscript{\rm 2}AffiliationTwo,\\ \textsuperscript{\rm 3}AffiliationThree,\\ \textsuperscript{\rm 4}AffiliationFour,\\ \textsuperscript{\rm 5}AffiliationFive\\ \{email, email\}@affiliation.com, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] }

You can indicate that some authors contributed equally using the \equalcontrib command. This will add a marker after the author names and a footnote on the first page.

Note that you may want to break the author list for better visualization. You can achieve this using a simple line break (\\).

L a T e X Copyright Notice

The copyright notice automatically appears if you use aaai25.sty. It has been hardcoded and may not be disabled.

Any credits to a sponsoring agency should appear in the acknowledgments section, unless the agency requires different placement. If it is necessary to include this information on the front page, use \thanks in either the \author or \title commands. For example:

\title{Very Important Results in AI\thanks{This work is supported by everybody.}}

Multiple \thanks commands can be given. Each will result in a separate footnote indication in the author or title with the corresponding text at the botton of the first column of the document. Note that the \thanks command is fragile. You will need to use \protect.

Please do not include \pubnote commands in your document.

Follow the example commands in this document for creation of your abstract. The command \begin{abstract} will automatically indent the text block. Please do not indent it further. Do not include references in your abstract!

Page Numbers

Do not print any page numbers on your paper. The use of \pagestyle is forbidden.

The main body of the paper must be formatted in black, ten-point Times Roman with twelve-point leading (line spacing). You may not reduce font size or the linespacing. Commands that alter font size or line spacing (including, but not limited to baselinestretch, baselineshift, linespread, and others) are expressly forbidden. In addition, you may not use color in the text.

Citations within the text should include the author’s last name and year, for example (Newell 1980). Append lower-case letters to the year in cases of ambiguity. Multiple authors should be treated as follows: (Feigenbaum and Engelmore 1988) or (Ford, Hayes, and Glymour 1992). In the case of four or more authors, list only the first author, followed by et al. (Ford et al. 1997).

Long quotations and extracts should be indented ten points from the left and right margins.

This is an example of an extract or quotation. Note the indent on both sides. Quotation marks are not necessary if you offset the text in a block like this, and properly identify and cite the quotation in the text.

Use footnotes judiciously, taking into account that they interrupt the reading of the text. When required, they should be consecutively numbered throughout with superscript Arabic numbers. Footnotes should appear at the bottom of the page, separated from the text by a blank line space and a thin, half-point rule.

Headings and Sections

When necessary, headings should be used to separate major sections of your paper. Remember, you are writing a short paper, not a lengthy book! An overabundance of headings will tend to make your paper look more like an outline than a paper. The aaai25.sty package will create headings for you. Do not alter their size nor their spacing above or below.

Section Numbers.

The use of section numbers in AAAI Press papers is optional. To use section numbers in L a T e X , uncomment the setcounter line in your document preamble and change the 0 to a 1. Section numbers should not be used in short poster papers and/or extended abstracts.

Section Headings.

Sections should be arranged and headed as follows:

Main content sections

Appendices (optional)

Ethical Statement (optional, unnumbered)

Acknowledgements (optional, unnumbered)

References (unnumbered)

Appendices.

Any appendices must appear after the main content. If your main sections are numbered, appendix sections must use letters instead of arabic numerals. In L a T e X you can use the \appendix command to achieve this effect and then use \section{Heading} normally for your appendix sections.

Ethical Statement.

You can write a statement about the potential ethical impact of your work, including its broad societal implications, both positive and negative. If included, such statement must be written in an unnumbered section titled Ethical Statement .

Acknowledgments.

The acknowledgments section, if included, appears right before the references and is headed “Acknowledgments”. It must not be numbered even if other sections are (use \section*{Acknowledgements} in L a T e X ). This section includes acknowledgments of help from associates and colleagues, credits to sponsoring agencies, financial support, and permission to publish. Please acknowledge other contributors, grant support, and so forth, in this section. Do not put acknowledgments in a footnote on the first page. If your grant agency requires acknowledgment of the grant on page 1, limit the footnote to the required statement, and put the remaining acknowledgments at the back. Please try to limit acknowledgments to no more than three sentences.

References.

The references section should be labeled “References” and must appear at the very end of the paper (don’t end the paper with references, and then put a figure by itself on the last page). A sample list of references is given later on in these instructions. Please use a consistent format for references. Poorly prepared or sloppy references reflect badly on the quality of your paper and your research. Please prepare complete and accurate citations.

Illustrations and Figures

Your paper must compile in PDF L a T e X . Consequently, all your figures must be .jpg, .png, or .pdf. You may not use the .gif (the resolution is too low), .ps, or .eps file format for your figures.

Figures, drawings, tables, and photographs should be placed throughout the paper on the page (or the subsequent page) where they are first discussed. Do not group them together at the end of the paper. If placed at the top of the paper, illustrations may run across both columns. Figures must not invade the top, bottom, or side margin areas. Figures must be inserted using the \usepackage{graphicx}. Number figures sequentially, for example, figure 1, and so on. Do not use minipage to group figures.

If you normally create your figures using pgfplots, please create the figures first, and then import them as pdfs with proper bounding boxes, as the bounding and trim boxes created by pfgplots are fragile and not valid.

When you include your figures, you must crop them outside of L a T e X . The command \includegraphics*[clip=true, viewport 0 0 10 10]… might result in a PDF that looks great, but the image is not really cropped. The full image can reappear (and obscure whatever it is overlapping) when page numbers are applied or color space is standardized. Figures 1 , and 2 display some unwanted results that often occur.

If your paper includes illustrations that are not compatible with PDF T e X (such as .eps or .ps documents), you will need to convert them. The epstopdf package will usually work for eps files. You will need to convert your ps files to PDF in either case.

Figure Captions.

The illustration number and caption must appear under the illustration. Labels and other text with the actual illustration must be at least nine-point type. However, the font and size of figure captions must be 10 point roman. Do not make them smaller, bold, or italic. (Individual words may be italicized if the context requires differentiation.)

Tables should be presented in 10 point roman type. If necessary, they may be altered to 9 point type. You must not use \resizebox or other commands that resize the entire table to make it smaller, because you can’t control the final font size this way. If your table is too large you can use \setlength{\tabcolsep}{1mm} to compress the columns a bit or you can adapt the content (e.g.: reduce the decimal precision when presenting numbers, use shortened column titles, make some column duble-line to get it narrower).

Tables that do not fit in a single column must be placed across double columns. If your table won’t fit within the margins even when spanning both columns and using the above techniques, you must split it in two separate tables.

Table Captions.

The number and caption for your table must appear under (not above) the table. Additionally, the font and size of table captions must be 10 point roman and must be placed beneath the figure. Do not make them smaller, bold, or italic. (Individual words may be italicized if the context requires differentiation.)

Low-Resolution Bitmaps.

You may not use low-resolution (such as 72 dpi) screen-dumps and GIF files—these files contain so few pixels that they are always blurry, and illegible when printed. If they are color, they will become an indecipherable mess when converted to black and white. This is always the case with gif files, which should never be used. The resolution of screen dumps can be increased by reducing the print size of the original file while retaining the same number of pixels. You can also enlarge files by manipulating them in software such as PhotoShop. Your figures should be 300 dpi when incorporated into your document.

L a T e X Overflow.

L a T e X users please beware: L a T e X will sometimes put portions of the figure or table or an equation in the margin. If this happens, you need to make the figure or table span both columns. If absolutely necessary, you may reduce the figure, or reformat the equation, or reconfigure the table. Check your log file! You must fix any overflow into the margin (that means no overfull boxes in L a T e X ). Nothing is permitted to intrude into the margin or gutter.

Using Color.

Use of color is restricted to figures only. It must be WACG 2.0 compliant. (That is, the contrast ratio must be greater than 4.5:1 no matter the font size.) It must be CMYK, NOT RGB. It may never be used for any portion of the text of your paper. The archival version of your paper will be printed in black and white and grayscale. The web version must be readable by persons with disabilities. Consequently, because conversion to grayscale can cause undesirable effects (red changes to black, yellow can disappear, and so forth), we strongly suggest you avoid placing color figures in your document. If you do include color figures, you must (1) use the CMYK (not RGB) colorspace and (2) be mindful of readers who may happen to have trouble distinguishing colors. Your paper must be decipherable without using color for distinction.

We suggest you use computer drawing software (such as Adobe Illustrator or, (if unavoidable), the drawing tools in Microsoft Word) to create your illustrations. Do not use Microsoft Publisher. These illustrations will look best if all line widths are uniform (half- to two-point in size), and you do not create labels over shaded areas. Shading should be 133 lines per inch if possible. Use Times Roman or Helvetica for all figure call-outs. Do not use hairline width lines — be sure that the stroke width of all lines is at least .5 pt. Zero point lines will print on a laser printer, but will completely disappear on the high-resolution devices used by our printers.

Photographs and Images.

Photographs and other images should be in grayscale (color photographs will not reproduce well; for example, red tones will reproduce as black, yellow may turn to white, and so forth) and set to a minimum of 300 dpi. Do not prescreen images.

Resizing Graphics.

Resize your graphics before you include them with LaTeX. You may not use trim or clip options as part of your \includegraphics command. Resize the media box of your PDF using a graphics program instead.

Fonts in Your Illustrations.

You must embed all fonts in your graphics before including them in your LaTeX document.

Algorithms.

Algorithms and/or programs are a special kind of figures. Like all illustrations, they should appear floated to the top (preferably) or bottom of the page. However, their caption should appear in the header, left-justified and enclosed between horizontal lines, as shown in Algorithm  1 . The algorithm body should be terminated with another horizontal line. It is up to the authors to decide whether to show line numbers or not, how to format comments, etc.

In L a T e X algorithms may be typeset using the algorithm and algorithmic packages, but you can also use one of the many other packages for the task.

Input : Your algorithm’s input Parameter : Optional list of parameters Output : Your algorithm’s output

Listings are much like algorithms and programs. They should also appear floated to the top (preferably) or bottom of the page. Listing captions should appear in the header, left-justified and enclosed between horizontal lines as shown in Listing  1 . Terminate the body with another horizontal line and avoid any background color. Line numbers, if included, must appear within the text column.

The AAAI style includes a set of definitions for use in formatting references with BibTeX. These definitions make the bibliography style fairly close to the ones specified in the Reference Examples appendix below. To use these definitions, you also need the BibTeX style file “aaai25.bst,” available in the AAAI Author Kit on the AAAI web site. Then, at the end of your paper but before \enddocument, you need to put the following lines:

\bibliography{bibfile1,bibfile2,…}

Please note that the aaai25.sty class already sets the bibliographystyle for you, so you do not have to place any \bibliographystyle command in the document yourselves. The aaai25.sty file is incompatible with the hyperref and navigator packages. If you use either, your references will be garbled and your paper will be returned to you.

References may be the same size as surrounding text. However, in this section (only), you may reduce the size to \small (9pt) if your paper exceeds the allowable number of pages. Making it any smaller than 9 point with 10 point linespacing, however, is not allowed.

The list of files in the \bibliography command should be the names of your BibTeX source files (that is, the .bib files referenced in your paper).

The following commands are available for your use in citing references:

\cite: Cites the given reference(s) with a full citation. This appears as “(Author Year)” for one reference, or “(Author Year; Author Year)” for multiple references. \shortcite: Cites the given reference(s) with just the year. This appears as “(Year)” for one reference, or “(Year; Year)” for multiple references. \citeauthor: Cites the given reference(s) with just the author name(s) and no parentheses. \citeyear: Cites the given reference(s) with just the date(s) and no parentheses.

You may also use any of the natbib citation commands.

Proofreading Your PDF

Please check all the pages of your PDF file. The most commonly forgotten element is the acknowledgements — especially the correct grant number. Authors also commonly forget to add the metadata to the source, use the wrong reference style file, or don’t follow the capitalization rules or comma placement for their author-title information properly. A final common problem is text (expecially equations) that runs into the margin. You will need to fix these common errors before submitting your file.

Improperly Formatted Files

In the past, AAAI has corrected improperly formatted files submitted by the authors. Unfortunately, this has become an increasingly burdensome expense that we can no longer absorb). Consequently, if your file is improperly formatted, it will be returned to you for correction.

Naming Your Electronic File

We require that you name your L a T e X source file with the last name (family name) of the first author so that it can easily be differentiated from other submissions. Complete file-naming instructions will be provided to you in the submission instructions.

Submitting Your Electronic Files to AAAI

Instructions on paper submittal will be provided to you in your acceptance letter.

If you have any questions about the preparation or submission of your paper as instructed in this document, please contact AAAI Press at the address given below. If you have technical questions about implementation of the aaai style file, please contact an expert at your site. We do not provide technical support for L a T e X or any other software package. To avoid problems, please keep your paper simple, and do not incorporate complicated macros and style files.

AAAI Press 1101 Pennsylvania Ave, NW Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA Telephone: 1-202-360-4062 E-mail: See the submission instructions for your particular conference or event.

Additional Resources

L a T e X is a difficult program to master. If you’ve used that software, and this document didn’t help or some items were not explained clearly, we recommend you read Michael Shell’s excellent document (testflow doc.txt V1.0a 2002/08/13) about obtaining correct PS/PDF output on L a T e X systems. (It was written for another purpose, but it has general application as well). It is available at www.ctan.org in the tex-archive.

Appendix A Reference Examples

* Formatted bibliographies should look like the following examples. You should use BibTeX to generate the references. Missing fields are unacceptable when compiling references, and usually indicate that you are using the wrong type of entry (BibTeX class).

Book with multiple authors 

Use the @book class. \bibentry em:86.

Journal and magazine articles 

Use the @article class. \bibentry r:80. \bibentry hcr:83.

Proceedings paper published by a society, press or publisher 

Use the @inproceedings class. You may abbreviate the booktitle field, but make sure that the conference edition is clear. \bibentry c:84. \bibentry c:83.

University technical report 

Use the @techreport class. \bibentry r:86.

Dissertation or thesis 

Use the @phdthesis class. \bibentry c:79.

Forthcoming publication 

Use the @misc class with a note="Forthcoming" annotation.

@misc(key, [...] note="Forthcoming", )

ArXiv paper 

Fetch the BibTeX entry from the ”Export Bibtex Citation” link in the arXiv website. Notice it uses the @misc class instead of the @article one, and that it includes the eprint and archivePrefix keys.

@misc(key, [...] eprint="xxxx.yyyy", archivePrefix="arXiv", )

Website or online resource 

Use the @misc class. Add the url in the howpublished field and the date of access in the note field:

@misc(key, [...] howpublished="\url{http://...}", note="Accessed: YYYY-mm-dd", )

For the most up to date version of the AAAI reference style, please consult the AI Magazine Author Guidelines at https://aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Appendix B Acknowledgments

AAAI is especially grateful to Peter Patel Schneider for his work in implementing the original aaai.sty file, liberally using the ideas of other style hackers, including Barbara Beeton. We also acknowledge with thanks the work of George Ferguson for his guide to using the style and BibTeX files — which has been incorporated into this document — and Hans Guesgen, who provided several timely modifications, as well as the many others who have, from time to time, sent in suggestions on improvements to the AAAI style. We are especially grateful to Francisco Cruz, Marc Pujol-Gonzalez, and Mico Loretan for the improvements to the Bib T e X and L a T e X files made in 2020.

The preparation of the L a T e X and Bib T e X files that implement these instructions was supported by Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, The Live Oak Press, LLC, and AAAI Press. Bibliography style changes were added by Sunil Issar. \ pubnote was added by J. Scott Penberthy. George Ferguson added support for printing the AAAI copyright slug. Additional changes to aaai25.sty and aaai25.bst have been made by Francisco Cruz, Marc Pujol-Gonzalez, and Mico Loretan.

Thank you for reading these instructions carefully. We look forward to receiving your electronic files!

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• Bibliography management with biblatex

When it comes to bibliography management packages, there are three main options in L a T e X : bibtex, natbib and biblatex. Biblatex is a modern program to process bibliography information, provides an easier and more flexible interface and a better language localization than the other two options. This article explains how to use biblatex to manage and format the bibliography in a L a T e X document.

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Basic usage
• 3 The bibliography file
• 4 Customizing the bibliography
• 5 Adding the bibliography in the table of contents
• 6 Reference guide
• 7 Further reading

Introduction

A minimal working example of the biblatex package is shown below:

There are four bibliography-related commands in this example:

Overleaf provides several templates with pre-defined styles to manage bibliography. See these examples.

 Open a biblatex package example on Overleaf

Basic usage

Several parameters can be passed to the package importing statement, let's see

Some extra options, inside brackets and comma-separated, are added when importing biblatex :

The rest of the commands were already explained at the introduction .

The bibliography file

The bibliography files must have the standard bibtex syntax

This file contains records in a special format, for instance, the first bibliographic reference is defined by:

The information in this file can later be printed and referenced within a L a T e X document, as shown in the previous sections, with the command \addbibresource{sample.bib} . Not all the information in the .bib file will be displayed, it depends on the bibliography style set in the document.

Customizing the bibliography

Biblatex allows high customization of the bibliography section with little effort. It was mentioned that several citation styles and bibliography styles are available, and you can also create new ones. Another customization option is to change the default title of the bibliography section.

The additional parameter title={Whole bibliography} passed inside brackets to the command \printbibliography is the one that changes the title.

The bibliography can also be subdivided into sections based on different filters, for instance: print only references from the same author, the same journal or similar title. Below an example.

Here, the bibliography is divided in 4 sections. The syntax of the commands used here is explained below:

Adding the bibliography in the table of contents

For the bibliography the be printed in the table of contents an extra option must be passed to \printbibliography

A section and a subsection are added to the table of contents:

• In the first case, adding heading=bibintoc adds the title to the table of contents as an unnumbered chapter if possible or as an unnumbered section otherwise.
• The second case is heading=subbibintoc that adds the title as a second level entry in the table of contents, in this example as a subsection nested in "Whole bibliography".

Reference guide

Supported entry types

Supported entry fields (The printed information depends on the bibliography style)

Bibliography sorting options

Further reading

For more information see

• Bibliography styles
• Biblatex citation styles
• Basic bibliography management
• Bibliography management with natbib
• biblatex documentation
• Documentation Home
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes

Overleaf guides

• Creating a document in Overleaf
• Uploading a project
• Copying a project
• Creating a project from a template
• Using the Overleaf project menu
• Including images in Overleaf
• Exporting your work from Overleaf
• Working offline in Overleaf
• Using Track Changes in Overleaf
• Using bibliographies in Overleaf
• Sharing your work with others
• Using the History feature
• Debugging Compilation timeout errors
• How-to guides
• Guide to Overleaf’s premium features

LaTeX Basics

• Creating your first LaTeX document
• Choosing a LaTeX Compiler
• Paragraphs and new lines
• Bold, italics and underlining

Mathematics

• Mathematical expressions
• Subscripts and superscripts
• Brackets and Parentheses
• Fractions and Binomials
• Aligning equations
• Spacing in math mode
• Integrals, sums and limits
• Display style in math mode
• List of Greek letters and math symbols
• Mathematical fonts
• Using the Symbol Palette in Overleaf

Figures and tables

• Inserting Images
• Positioning Images and Tables
• Lists of Tables and Figures
• Drawing Diagrams Directly in LaTeX
• TikZ package

References and Citations

• Bibliography management with bibtex
• Bibtex bibliography styles
• Natbib bibliography styles
• Natbib citation styles
• Biblatex bibliography styles
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using polyglossia and fontspec
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using babel and fontspec
• International language support
• Quotations and quotation marks

Document structure

• Sections and chapters
• Table of contents
• Cross referencing sections, equations and floats
• Nomenclatures
• Management in a large project
• Multi-file LaTeX projects
• Lengths in L a T e X
• Headers and footers
• Page numbering
• Paragraph formatting
• Line breaks and blank spaces
• Text alignment
• Page size and margins
• Single sided and double sided documents
• Multiple columns
• Code listing
• Code Highlighting with minted
• Using colours in LaTeX
• Margin notes
• Font sizes, families, and styles
• Font typefaces
• Supporting modern fonts with X Ǝ L a T e X

Presentations

• Environments

Field specific

• Theorems and proofs
• Chemistry formulae
• Feynman diagrams
• Molecular orbital diagrams
• Chess notation
• Knitting patterns
• CircuiTikz package
• Pgfplots package
• Typesetting exams in LaTeX
• Attribute Value Matrices

Class files

• Understanding packages and class files
• List of packages and class files
• Writing your own package
• Writing your own class

Advanced TeX/LaTeX

• In-depth technical articles on TeX/LaTeX

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Unable to include a thesis reference

I want to include a thesis reference, but not able to do it. The MWE is here:

In the .bbl file, the reference is included as follows:

In the .pdf output, the reference is always gives as [?]

• bibliographies

• Are you compiling the files in the suggested sequence? latex, bibtex, latex, latex? –  Masroor Commented Oct 3, 2013 at 2:44
• Also you mention the reference in the .bbl file. That seems to be wrong, it should be in a .bib file. A .bbl file is generated when you run bibtex. –  Masroor Commented Oct 3, 2013 at 3:04
• 3 The .tex file you provide above has no way of knowing where to find this citation (which should [in that form] be in a .bib file, not a .bbl ). You probably need to add: \bibliographystyle{IEEEtran} \bibliography{<name of your bibfile>} , or something like that. Then you need to run a sequence of latex-bibtex-latex-latex (or pdflatex ) as mentioned already. –  jon Commented Oct 3, 2013 at 3:19

You need to provide a little more assistance in order for the references to show up:

Now follow these steps:

• Compile using (PDF)LaTeX which will produce thesis.bib as well as a .aux file. The .aux file is requesting a citation called mythesis , which doesn't exist anywhere (according to LaTeX, that is).
• Compile using BibTeX. This will produce a .bbl file based on your .aux and thesis.bib .

Compile using (PDF)LaTeX again which will now have a valid .bbl file containing the relevant bibliography information in it:

Essentially, BibTeX produces a thebibliography environment that can be included in your document.

(optional) Compile with (PDF)LaTeX to make any references settle after the citations are valid.

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