biblatex in a nutshell (for beginners)

Question

Is there a 'biblatex in a nutshell' guide out there? I'd like if someone explained to me the essentials on how to use biblatex (what lines I have to write in my document, which files I have to have, how many times and what I have to compile), so then I can go to http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/biblatex/doc/biblatex.pdf to customise it further.

Answer 1

A minimal document for biblatex would be

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{biblatex}
% \bibliography{<database>} % deprecated
\addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}
\begin{document}
\cite{<some-ref>}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

which requires a <database> file in .bib format. You then run:

1. LaTeX
2. Biber
3. LaTeX

Normally, you'd also select a bibliography style by loading this an an optional argument to the biblatex line

\usepackage[style=numeric-comp]{biblatex}

See How to use biber and Biblatex with Biber: Configuring my editor to avoid undefined citations for more if your editor is not set up to offer Biber 'out of the box'.

---

For some time, biblatex has supported two 'backends' (the program that extracts references from the .bib file), BibTeX and Biber. As of version 2, Biber is the default backend, so I have used it above. Biber is more powerful and works natively with UTF-8 input, but where it is not available one can fall back on more limited support using BibTeX. The workflow is pretty similar:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex8]{biblatex}
% \bibliography{<database>} % deprecated
\addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}
\begin{document}
\cite{<some-ref>}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

and you then need to run

1. LaTeX
2. BibTeX
3. LaTeX

As you'll see, this is very little difference from using Biber: basically replace 'Biber' with 'BibTeX'.

You should use the '8-bit' version of BibTeX as a minimum, rather than the ancient 7-bit BibTeX. At the Command line, this is used by doing

bibtex8 --wolfgang <filename>

where <filename> is the name of your LaTeX file.

There is more you can do, but this should get you started.

---

Recent versions of biblatex have deprecated

\bibliography{<database>} % Must be .bib

in favour of the more general

 \addbibresource{<database>.<extension>}

The latter is more general, but you must include the file extension (usually .bib).

Answer 2

biblatex comes with a variety of built-in bibliography/citation style families (numeric, alphabetic, authoryear, authortitle, verbose), and there's a growing number of custom styles. That said, here's how to approximately emulate the output of the traditional BibTeX styles plain, abbrv, unsrt, and alpha:

plain --> \usepackage[style=numeric]{biblatex}

abbrv --> \usepackage[style=numeric,giveninits=true]{biblatex}

unsrt --> \usepackage[style=numeric,sorting=none]{biblatex}

alpha --> \usepackage[style=alphabetic]{biblatex}

In the first three instances, you may omit style=numeric as this is the default style of biblatex.

Answer 3

Section 1 of the biblatex documentation, which you're referring to, reads:

This document is a systematic reference manual for the biblatex package. Look at the sample documents which ship with biblatex [1] to get a first impression. For a quick start guide, browse §§ 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.3, 3.6, 3.7, 3.11.

I just got started with biblatex by reading these sections (and trying out the things described) and I feel like they gave me a thorough overview of the basic functions. Of course, there's a lot among this information that you can just skim or skip, but I think it's good to know what options are out there.

I read into the German article that Herbert referred to as well, but I didn't feel like it really told me what to do and how to get started, but perhaps that's because this is the first time I ever used some kind of bibliography tool in LaTeX.

If you need to decide whether to use BibTeX or Biber as a backend, Alan Munn's extensive (but comprehensible!) answer to bibtex vs. biber and biblatex vs. natbib might be of help to you. I decided to use Biber.

Concludingly, I recommend going straight to the source and getting some first-hand information by reading the mentioned parts of the biblatex documentation.

Answer 4

I too would like to find what the OP is asking about (an introductory-type document on BibLaTeX). I haven't found one yet, but here are two documents that I did find useful towards that end:

http://tex.aanhet.net/rugtex/course/4bibtex.pdf

Broken link now, but what I found most helpful is here:

3.5 The latest and greatest: biblatex

A radical reimplementation of bibliography support is biblatex. Bibliography styles aren’t writ- ten in the unfamiliar .bst syntax but in LaTEX, and the role of BibTEX is reduced to collecting and sorting the bibliographic data. LaTEX itself selects, arranges and formats the information from the bibliographic entries. Advantages include

• many variations in bibliography style can be realized simply with package options, without editing .bst files

• better support for non-Western languages

• more citation options, because LaTEX has access to all the bibliographic information

• easy per-chapter bibliographies

Fortunately, an old BibTEX database is still compatible with biblatex.

Getting started with biblatex. You can easily experiment with biblatex. For starters, use the package option natbib or natbib=true so that you don’t need to change the cite commands in your LaTEX source just yet. Latexbib uses mostly the same database format and requires only a few small changes in the preamble and at the end of your document. Biblatex preamble commands for the example below:

\usepackage[style=numeric,natbib=true]{biblatex}
\bibliography{bibdemo}

and near the end:

\printbibliography

Note that with biblatex the \bibliography command should be in the preamble.

http://www.charlietanksley.net/pdf/latex-footnote-citations.pdf

This is now (8/10/2013) also a broken link, and that's too bad because I found the document very helpful two years ago. I still have both these files, but I can't do justice to this second one in the answer here. I've attached an image of the first page, but would gladly post the pdf if it was possible.

Answer 5

If you are familiar with German, you'll find a two-part introduction in "Die TeXnische Komödie", the journal of DANTE: DTK 2/2008, DTK 4/2008.

You can start with one of the default settings, e.g.:

\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}
\bibliography{...} % better use \addbibresource, according to the comments
...
\nocite{*} % adds all entries in the bib file to the bibliography
\printbibliography

There are a lot of examples in your local TeX installation (at texmf/doc/latex/biblatex/examples/).

Answer 6

To add to the other resources here, simply for the sake of having them in one convenient place, I have put together a medium-length introduction, intended to be an "easier read" than the full manual, which can be found on GitHub. It's aimed at the "ordinary user" not someone writing a complete style.

Although the current release remains a draft, and I expect to update it, it is complete, and basically "there" subject to some nit-picking. Chapter 1 and the Quick Start Guide (p 109) are introductory.

Answer 7

For French-speaking people, this site tries to popularise LaTeX among students in humanities. You can download from this page a .pdf of about 60 pages entitled "Biblatex expliqué à Mademoiselle Michu, étudiante en sciences humaines" (something like "Biblatex explained to Miss Jane Bloggs, a Student in Humanities"), that I find a rather good and simple approach.

Answer 8

Here is a minimal working example.

First file, doc.tex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex]{biblatex}
\bibliography{database.bib}
\begin{document}
According to \cite{foo1999} blah blah.
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Second file, database.bib:

@article{foo1999,
  title={Title},
  author={Doe, John},
  journal={International Journal of Nonsense},
  year={1999}
}

To compile:

pdflatex doc
bibtex doc
pdflatex doc
pdflatex doc

Result in doc.pdf:

Answer 9

Overleaf have a series of very accessible posts on the matter of bibliographies with LaTeX.

The main article dealing with basic biblatex is https://overleaf.com/learn/latex/Bibliography_management_in_LaTeX. The nice thing for Overleaf users is that the article links example documents that can be used to experiment with the presented settings.

The two lists https://overleaf.com/learn/latex/Biblatex_bibliography_styles and https://overleaf.com/learn/latex/Biblatex_citation_styles give a short run-down of common bibliography and citation styles.

There is also another tutorial-like article: https://overleaf.com/learn/latex/Articles/Getting_started_with_BibLaTeX with a video (originally from ShareLaTeX).

Finally, there is https://overleaf.com/learn/how-to/Using_bibliographies_on_Overleaf, which deals mainly with .bib files.

When reading these articles, keep in mind that often online editors run Biber automatically for you (Overleaf does that via latexmk) and that their tutorials therefore do not usually touch on this otherwise crucial step. See Question mark or bold citation key instead of citation number

Answer 10

If you read French, you could look at http://www.ctan.org/pkg/latex-sciences-humaines.

Answer 11

If you can read a little of French, here are the slides of a LaTeX course I give about biblatex and csquotes.

Answer 12

• I make tutorials about BiBLaTeX in my spare time -- have a look -- maybe it helps.
• For the experts here, I didn't choose UTF-8, please don't make a war about it :).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-Wl6F3zpJVwcDHK2rg9bDEEMjo70zp87

Answer 13

A quit nice cheatsheet is available here: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-cheatsheet

Answer 14

I found this website to be a really nice practical explanation of how to "trace macros" in biblatex, which I previously found very confusing: http://www.khirevich.com/latex/biblatex/

Ooops, a few minutes later... I notice that @Siarhei Khirevich has already posted his website to the tex.stackexchange.com here: What to do to switch to biblatex?

I have opted to keep my answer to this question, because I believe that the website provided by @Siarhei Khirevich deserves to be more widely known (I found it through Google rather than on tex.stackexchange.com).