Is it possible to have back references after each chapter with a single main.bib file?

Question

I'm using LaTeX + BibTeX to write my dissertation. I have one separate .tex file for each chapter. And I'll generate one bibliography for each chapter. But all the references are from the same file (main.bib).

So, there are many situations in which different chapters will cite the same reference. Thus, one reference can appear more than once in the bibliographies of the whole dissertation (but in different chapters). I'd like to use back references from the hyperref package. I'm just wondering whether it would be possible to do so?

% chapter 1
Bibliography
[1]. A and B, Nature, 1991. 15, 20.
...

% chapter 2
Bibliography
...
[3]. A and B, Nature, 1991. 55, 67.
...

Answer 1

You may want to try using the chapterbib package. (There's also the bibunits package, but since you state that your chapters are contained in separate .tex files, it may be easiest to proceed with the chapterbib package.) This package is designed to create bibliographies separately for each chapter, regardless of the number of bib files you have.

The following MWE demonstrates the usage of this package with a very basic setup. It loads the packages natbib, chapterbib, hyperref, and backref as well as the bibliography style file plainnat.bst. The file demo.bib contains:

@article{abadir:1993a,
    author       = "Karim M. Abadir",
    title        = "{OLS} bias in a nonstationary autoregression",
    journal      = "Econometric Theory",
    year         = 1993,
    volume       = 9,
    number       = 1,
    pages        = "81--93"
}

The "chapter" files demo-1.tex, demo-2.tex, and demo-3.tex each contain (they're identical):

\chapter{Hello}  
\citet{abadir:1993a}\clearpage\citet{abadir:1993a}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{demo}

(Note that each chapter issues two citation calls.) The overall driver file, demo.tex, contains:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{natbib,chapterbib,hyperref,backref}
\begin{document}
\include{demo-1}
\include{demo-2}
\include{demo-3}
\end{document}

Run (pdf)latex twice on demo.tex; run bibtex once each on demo1.tex, demo2.tex, and demo3.tex; and run (pdf)latex twice more on demo.tex. The compiled document, demo.pdf, should contain 11 pages (4 pages each for chapters 1 and 2, and 3 pages for chapter 3). The typeset bibliography of chapter 3, on page 11, looks like this:

The back references for the bibliographies of chapters 1 and 2 should be "pages 1, 2" and "pages 5, 6", respectively.

You can, of course, adjust the appearance of the back references; see the manual of the backref package for details.

Answer 2

The following solution is based on biblatex and provides what you want: It uses the biblatex concept of segments (see §3.5.4 of the biblatex manual) to define a context for citation tracking. By the refsegment=chapter class option every chapter becomes a segment on its own; at the end of each chapter the segment-specific bibliography is printed; at the end of the document a chapter with the full bibliography is printed. All this works well with back-references, for which biblatex provides built-in support by a dedicated class option.

The only (possible) issue might be that the back-references are always complete. This means that if you cite a source in both, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, the back-ref list of the Chapter 1 bibliography will also contain the entry for the respective page in Chapter 2.

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage[defernums=true, hyperref, backref, refsegment=chapter]{biblatex}
% Define typesetting of references heading
\defbibheading{references}[References]{% 
  \section*{#1}% 
  \markboth{#1}{#1}%
}

% Define typesetting of bibliography heading
\defbibheading{bibliography}[Complete Bibliography]{% 
  % define as above if you want to have this numbered as well:
  \chapter*{#1}%
  \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{#1}
  \markboth{#1}{#1}%
}


% The filtecontent package is just used to create an example .bib-File
% automatically out of the following (for the MWE)
\usepackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@misc{A01,
  author = {Author, A.},
  year = {2001},
  title = {Alpha},
}
@misc{B02,
  author = {Buthor, B.},
  year = {2002},
  title = {Bravo},
}
@misc{C03,
  author = {Cuthor, C.},
  year = {2003},
  title = {Charlie},
}
\end{filecontents}

% The bibtex database to use (mybib for mybib.bib)
\bibliography{\jobname}


\begin{document}

\tableofcontents
\cleardoublepage

\chapter{First Chapter}

Some more text \autocite{A01,B02}.

% print the segment-specific bibliography (using the references style 
% defined above for the heading
\printbibliography[heading=references,segment=\therefsegment]

\chapter{Second Chapter}

Some text \autocite{A01,C03}.

\printbibliography[heading=references,segment=\therefsegment]


% print the full bibliography (using the bibliography style 
% defined above for the heading above
\printbibliography[heading=bibliography]

\end{document}