Reducing space between items of reference

Question

I want to reduce the space between items of my references. After reading many related posts and trying various methods, I was still unable to do that :(

I use BibTeX and here is my code (the references are contained in a separated file called "myref.bib"):

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage{CJKutf8}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{setspace,lipsum}

\begin{document}

This is the main content.

\begin{spacing}{0.7}
\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{myref}
\end{spacing}

\end{document}

With this method, I can reduce the space in each item, however, the space between different entries is still huge. How to reduce them?

Answer 1

Rather than reducing the leading (the space between lines of text), it would be preferable to reduce the font size. In the example I use \small, but you could try \footnotesize.

In order to reduce the spacing between items, you can reduce the \itemsep.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\patchcmd{\thebibliography}
  {\settowidth}
  {\setlength{\itemsep}{0pt plus 0.1pt}\settowidth}
  {}{}
\apptocmd{\thebibliography}
  {\small}
  {}{}

\begin{document}

This is the main content.

\cite{Abrahams:TI90}

\cite{Barwise:NAMS-36-3-241}

\cite{Knuth:ct-a}

\bibliographystyle{alpha}
\bibliography{texbook1}

\end{document}

The example uses one of the common bibliographic databases available in TeX Live.

If you want to remove all vertical space between items, but I advise not doing it, change the \patchcmd into

\patchcmd{\thebibliography}
  {\settowidth}
  {\setlength{\parsep}{0pt}\setlength{\itemsep}{0pt plus 0.1pt}\settowidth}
  {}{}