What is the easiest way to generate a compact bibliography?

Question

In a beamer presentation I want to use the \nocite{*} macro, so all entries in the bib file will be included, regardless whether I actually cited an entry or not. However, this yields a rather long list of references, since each entry yields many details.

What is the easiest way to generate a compact list of references. In particular, each entry should contain: Title, author(s) (probably at most 2), year.

It sounds like an easy task, but I couldn't find the right solution.

Edit:

1. There is no particular reason for me not to use biblatex. It is an option.
2. Mostly, in the presentation's body there will be no citations. In case few would appear I'd like them to be formated with a number. Like: On Foo Bar, see [1]. Nevertheless, the list of reference will be long as I will use the \notice{*} macro.
3. In the list itself, I'd like to have: Title, authors (at most 2, otherwise with "et al"), year.

Answer 1

Another biblatex solution.

As basis we take biblatex's numeric with maxnames=2

\usepackage[style=numeric,maxnames=2]{biblatex}

We define our short bibliography driver std that prints only the author/editor, title and date

\DeclareBibliographyDriver{std}{%
  \usebibmacro{bibindex}%
  \usebibmacro{begentry}%
  \usebibmacro{author/editor+others/translator+others}%
  \setunit{\labelnamepunct}\newblock
  \usebibmacro{title}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{date}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{finentry}}

We then map all the entries to use this driver (I really hoped, there would be a shorter, more elegant way to do this, but I have yet to find it)

\DeclareBibliographyAlias{article}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{book}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{booklet}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{collection}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{inbook}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{incollection}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{inproceedings}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{manual}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{misc}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{online}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{patent}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{periodical}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{proceedings}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{report}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{thesis}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{unpublished}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{*}{std}

To get the citation label instead of the "cute little icon", we can use

\setbeamertemplate{bibliography item}[text]

See Beamer-Template/-Color/-Font bibliography item, p. 102 of the beamer user guide.

MWE

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage[style=numeric,maxnames=2]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\setbeamertemplate{bibliography item}[text]

\DeclareBibliographyAlias{article}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{book}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{booklet}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{collection}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{inbook}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{incollection}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{inproceedings}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{manual}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{misc}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{online}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{patent}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{periodical}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{proceedings}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{report}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{thesis}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{unpublished}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{*}{std}

\DeclareBibliographyDriver{std}{%
  \usebibmacro{bibindex}%
  \usebibmacro{begentry}%
  \usebibmacro{author/editor+others/translator+others}%
  \setunit{\labelnamepunct}\newblock
  \usebibmacro{title}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{date}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{finentry}}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
  \cite{wilde,baez/article,cicero,aksin,westfahl:space,westfahl:frontier,gaonkar,britannica}
\end{frame}
\begin{frame}
  \printbibliography
\end{frame}
\end{document}

Answer 2

In the following, I use biblatex to:

• Restrict the number of author names to two by passing the maxnames=2, minnames=2 options to the biblatex package.
• Tailor the content of the bibliography via the \AtEveryitem hook. Inside this hook, I use \clearfield/name/list{<element>} to exclude certain fields from being printed.

For many fields the latter is also possible by global biblatex options, such as doi=false. However, this does not work for all fields. For me, the hooks makes it also more easy to "play" with different settings by just commenting in/out the respective \clearfield lines.

\documentclass{beamer}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage[backend=bibtex,style=numeric,maxnames=2, minnames=2]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{beamer.bib}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{filecontents}{beamer.bib}
@article{hoare:69:cacm,
  author = {Hoare, C. A. R.},
  title = {An axiomatic basis for computer programming},
  journal = {Communications of the ACM},
  volume = 12,
  number = 10,
  month = oct,
  year = 1969,
  issn = {0001-0782},
  pages = {576--580},
  doi = {10.1145/363235.363259},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
}
@article{dijkstra:68:cacm,
  author = {Edsger Wybe Dijkstra},
  title = {The Structure of the {THE}-Multiprogramming System},
  journal = {Communications of the ACM},
  year = {1968},
  month = may,
  volume = 11,
  number = 5,
  pages = {341--346},
}
@article{graham:68:cacm,
  author = {Robert M. Graham},
  title = {Protection in an Information Processing Utility},
  journal = {Communications of the ACM},
  volume = {11},
  number = {5},
  month = may,
  year = {1968},
  issn = {0001-0782},
  pages = {365--369},
  doi = {10.1145/363095.363146},
  publisher = {ACM Press},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
}
@inproceedings{henkel:11:codesisss,
  title = {Design and Architectures for Dependable Embedded Systems},
  author = { Henkel,J{\"o}rg and Bauer,Lars and Becker,Joachim and Bringmann,Oliver and Brinkschulte,Uwe and Chakraborty,Samarjit and Engel,Michael and Ernst,Rolf and H{\"a}rtig,Hermann and Hedrich,Lars and Herkersdorf,Andreas and R{\"u}diger Kapitza and Daniel Lohmann and Marwedel,Peter and Platzner,Marco and Rosenstiel,Wolfgang and Schlichtmann,Ulf and Spinczyk,Olaf and Tahoori,Mehdi and J{\"u}rgen Teich and Wehn,Norbert and Wunderlich,Hans-Joachim},
  keywords = {embedded systems, dependable systems, danceos},
  doi = {10.1145/2039370.2039384},
  pages = {69--78},
  editor = {Robert P. Dick and Jan Madsen},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-0715-4},
  venue = {Taipei, Taiwan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS '11)},
  year = {2011},
  month = oct,
  publisher = {ACM Press},
}

\end{filecontents}


% Content Tailoring
%
% tailor content of bibliography
\AtEveryBibitem{
   \clearfield{month}
   \clearfield{series}
   \clearfield{venue}
   \clearname{editor}
   \clearlist{publisher}
   \clearlist{location} % alias to field 'address'
   \clearfield{doi}
   \clearfield{url}
   \clearfield{venue}
   \clearfield{issn}
   \clearfield{isbn}
   \clearfield{urldate}
   \clearfield{eventdate}
   %\clearfield{pages}
   %\clearfield{booktitle}
   %\clearfield{journaltitle}
   %\clearfield{number}
   %\clearfield{volume}
}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\begin{frame}[allowframebreaks]
    \printbibliography
\end{frame}
\end{document}

The result looks as follows:

If you want to get rid of even more data, just uncomment the additional lines in the \AtEveryBibitem handler:

Answer 3

With this style file: http://comedy.dante.de/~herbert/Bibliography/plain-short.bst

and

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\bibliographystyle{plain-short}
\bibliography{ref-antibiotics}

\end{document}

you'll get:

Answer 4

For shortening bibliographies I recommend to generate a new bib file, where you specify only the fields you really need. (Leaving out middle names, employ common conference and journal abbreviations, etc.) As you see in the answer from Daniel, it is not easy to filter them out afterwards, and you will probably miss one or two. Keep in mind, that some bibitems e.g. @article need some journal title and will print extra symbols like: In:. For that, Moewe greatly smashes all bibitems to some std type, very elegantly!

So now to my contribution: Ahh there is none, just searched this site for some time.

• Basically, there is much space wasted from item symbols to item text (horizontally). You may reduce this with: \setlength{\biblabelsep}{-0.5cm}.
• Additionally, biblatex offers you the possibility to use for the firstnames initials as well: firstinits=true.
• the original symbol here, consumes a lot of space as well, change it to some smaller: \setbeamertemplate{bibliography item}[triangle]
• The rest comes from another great answer Reduce spacing in bibliography using biblatex, which I would consider a bit of a possible duplicate, however, your question is beamer related, so, the begingroup and endgroup stuff reduces vertical space once more:
• last but not least sometimes the microtype package might safe some space as well (this is one of the package I regular include)

\documentclass[compress]{beamer}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[style=numeric-comp,firstinits=true,maxcitenames=2,maxbibnames=2]{biblatex}
% % Do this to reduce size
% \renewcommand*{\bibfont}{\footnotesize}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\DeclareBibliographyAlias{article}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{book}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{booklet}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{collection}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{inbook}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{incollection}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{inproceedings}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{manual}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{misc}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{online}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{patent}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{periodical}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{proceedings}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{report}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{thesis}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{unpublished}{std}
\DeclareBibliographyAlias{*}{std}

\DeclareBibliographyDriver{std}{%
  \usebibmacro{bibindex}%
  \usebibmacro{begentry}%
  \usebibmacro{author/editor+others/translator+others}%
  \setunit{\labelnamepunct}\newblock
  \usebibmacro{title}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{date}%
  \newunit\newblock
  \usebibmacro{finentry}
}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}[t,allowframebreaks]{Bibliography}
  \nocite{*}
  \begingroup
  \setstretch{0.8}
  \linespread{0.9}
  \setbeamertemplate{bibliography item}[triangle]
  \setlength\bibitemsep{-0pt}
  \setlength{\biblabelsep}{-0.5cm}
  \printbibliography
  \endgroup
\end{frame}

\end{document}

in comparison to moewes answer: