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For referencing in my LaTeX documents, I use the thebibliography command. However most of the times I find the information of my citations in BibTeX format. Manually editing BibTeX file to convert them to \bibitem is exhausting. I want to know if there is any method for importing a bibTeX file or a command which could understand the text structure of a BibTeX file in LaTeX?

Marco Daniel
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Naji
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    This question is answered in nearly every introduction. One example is here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Bibliography_Management -- You should use biblatex to manage your bibliography on LaTeX site. – Marco Daniel Apr 21 '13 at 12:59
  • @MarcoDaniel Thank you. But here the only method is to import your .bib file. Is there anyway to do it in the same file without importing anything. To make the tex file process the material of a .bib file by copying it into TeX file. – Naji Apr 21 '13 at 13:04
  • Why do you want to avoid biblatex or BibTex? After compiling with bibtex you have file with the extension bbl. This file contains the environment thebibliography. – Marco Daniel Apr 21 '13 at 13:07
  • The only reason is I want to keep everything in the same file. Plus, right now half of my citations are as bibitems, not bibTeX files. – Naji Apr 21 '13 at 13:08
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    In my opinion it isn't a good way to provide only one single file. Structuring a document has a lot of benefits: Techniques and packages to keep up with good practices -- Nevertheless you can use the package filecontents. So you can have the contents of your bib-file in your single file and you can edit the entries. – Marco Daniel Apr 21 '13 at 13:15
  • @MarcoDaniel, that is true. But now I have to manually change all of my old bibitems to bibTeX format. Right? Cause bibTeX does not compile "bibitem"s. – Naji Apr 21 '13 at 13:27
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    That's correct. But providing a database of bib-entries will help you later. And you can manipulate string global. – Marco Daniel Apr 21 '13 at 13:32

1 Answers1

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If you really want to follow this way, you can create a new document, let's say test.tex with the following contents:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{biblio}
\end{document}

where biblio is the name of your .bib file.

Then run

pdflatex test

bibtex test

pdflatex test

pdflatex test

At this point, open the file test.bbl and copy its contents to your original .tex file

karlkoeller
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