How to populate a bibliography in the book class?

Question

Today I have been playing with LATEX and I really like it up to now! But i have a problem with populating an apa style bibliography. Right now I am busy with making a template for a thesis and i am doing this by use of the book documentclass. I have been able to produce the following (in the preamble):

\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[american]{babel}
\usepackage[style=apa,natbib=true]{biblatex}
\bibliography{mylib}
\DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}

(in the middle of my code to call the cite):

\cite{Vickrey1961}.

(At the end of my document, before \end(document) to populate the bibliography):

 \printbibliography

Though, it doesn't work. When i compile the code neither errors nor the bibliography with references are being displayed. Does somebody can help me out??

Tnx in advance

Hi and welcome, does Question mark instead of citation number help you? — Johannes_B, Nov 16 '14 at 16:14
Well partly, i do get some messages which say the following "Citation 'Vickrey1961' on page 1 undefined", "Empty bibliography" and "There were undefined references". I also can't find any references to mylib.bib in the console. — user2237168, Nov 16 '14 at 17:09
Those messages are expected on the first run of latex, you then need to run biber to generate the bibliography — David Carlisle, Nov 16 '14 at 17:14
Could you tell me how to run biber then? It seems that i'm only able to run LaTeX and BibTex from my editor. — user2237168, Nov 16 '14 at 17:21
Go to the settinges of your Editor and define a command, all TeX-Editors should have this feature. Or you open a terminal and do it manually with biber mydocument.bcf. — MaxNoe, Nov 16 '14 at 17:23
Thanks, you saved my day! I ran the bcf file in my terminal and now it works. The reference is being displayed correctly and the bibliography has been populated! — user2237168, Nov 16 '14 at 17:40

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 16 '14 at 17:32

1

This is how it works:

First run: latex-compiler Biblatex generates a file mydocument.bcf in which it lists your bibliography files and the citation it needs.

Second run: biber: biber reads the mydocument.bcf file and your bib and creates the needed latex-code for the citations and the bibliography. The output is written to the mydocument.bbl

Third run: latex-compiler LaTeX reads the created mydocument.bbl and puts everything in the right places.

Fourth run: latex-compiler This fourth run is sometimes needed because of the changing labels of citations and the bibliography itself page numbers might have changed and the table of contents has to be updated.

latexmk automates this process, it looks itself what has to be run how many times and when.

What engine do you use? If you are using biblatex with biber i would recommend one of the newer native-unicode engines, so either lualatex or xetex.

answered Nov 16 '14 at 17:32

MaxNoe

6,136

At this moment i'm using biblatex with biber. Thanx for your advice, but it is working fine now. I had to run biber in the second place after i had run LaTeX. Then I ran LaTeX again and it worked like a charm. – user2237168 Nov 16 '14 at 17:59
i meant which LaTeX-engine ;) So it should either be pdflatex, lualatex or xetex. Where the latter two are more modern implentations that can directly handle unicode input and opentype-fonts. – MaxNoe Nov 16 '14 at 18:02
Ah okay, i'm fairly new to the program so that's why I still have to get used to the LaTeX jargon ;). But at this moment i'm using pdflatex as far as i'm concerned – user2237168 Nov 16 '14 at 18:08

How to populate a bibliography in the book class?

1 Answers1