1

Can anyone help me with the citations on my report? When the Latex compiles, the error message "no file pmrep.bbl" appears and the citations show up as '?' in the PDF viewer.

My bib file (nbsrep.bib):

@misc{blackboard2016,
author = "Blackboard",
title = "Blackboard Collaborate"
note ="http://www.blackboard.com/online-collaborative-learning/blackboard-collaborate.aspx",
urldate = "2016-10-28",
year = "2016"
}
@misc{clarke2016,
author = "Lauren Clarke",
organization = "Concrete",
title = "Is the UEA campus becoming unrecognisable? - concrete",
note = "http://www.concrete-online.co.uk/uea-campus-unrecognisable/",
urldate = "2016-10-27",
year = "2016",
month = "06",
day = "14"
}
@misc{frankkeyes2015,
author = "Jessica Frank-Keyes",
organization = "Concrete",
title = "UEA plans to recruit 20\% more students by 2030 - concrete",
note = "http://www.concrete-online.co.uk/uea-plans-to-recruit-20-more-    students-by-2030/",
urldate = "2016-10-27",
year = "2015",
month = "11",
day = "30"
}
@misc{uea2016,
author = " UEA",
title = "Archived annual facts and figures booklets Archived annual facts     and figures booklets",
note = "https://portal.uea.ac.uk/planningoffice/biu/planning-and-management/facts-and-figures",
urldate = "2016-10-27",
year = "2016"
}

My tex file (pmreport):

\documentclass[final]{nbsreport}
%%\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{natbib}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}

\section{Blackboard Collaborate Report}

 \subsection{Introduction}
The University is currently struggling to fulfill the needs of teaching staff who require rooms to conduct their seminars, lectures, labs and workshops. With over 14,000 students currently enrolled in the university you can begin to understand, with a further 3,000 expected in the next few years \citep{uea2016, frankkeyes2015}. Likewise, in the UEA 2030 vision programme there are plans to demolish older buildings on campus which include; CD Annex, Blackdale and Congregation Hall \citep{clarke2016}. As a result teaching staff have voiced there concerns with one particular statement coming from the School of Biology who stated "it is putting a huge strain on teaching resources within the school' \citep{clarke2016}. 

The new technology that has been implemented is Blackboard Collaborate a simple, convenient and reliable online virtual classroom solution \citep{blackboard2016}. It allows organization such as UEA to deliver engagement to their students even though they are not in the same room \citep{blackboard2016}.  This new technology enables seminar groups to be delivered with students distributed in various areas such as; home, work or even in another country as long as they have internet connectivity. Currently the technology is not widely understood by the university teaching staff. Our project team was assembled to define, design, plan and deliver a Global Showcase Event that will powerfully demonstrate the new technology to the university teaching staff. Additionally, recruit staff ambassadors that will enable promotion within their respected university school. The reason behind the project team being formed was that ITCS currently have a heavy workload and cannot fully commit to promoting the technology this academic year. 

\bibliography{nbsrep}
\end{document}
Mico
  • 506,678
  • Your document is missing a \bibliographystyle instruction. Absent such an instruction, BibTeX doesn't know how to format the entries and hence does nothing at all. – Mico Nov 14 '16 at 20:42
  • @Mico I just added it in and it still does not work, giving me the error message and ? for the citations. There is a cls file also being used which states the \bibliographystyle already? – Nessa Nguyen Nov 14 '16 at 20:56
  • Please be specific about the aspects of "it still does not work". E.g., which bibliography style did you select? Did you re-run LaTeX, BibTeX, and LaTeX twice more after selecting a suitable bibliography style? Incidentally, where might one find a copy of nbsreport.cls online? – Mico Nov 14 '16 at 21:02
  • Incidentally, the first bib entry (blackboard2016) contains a syntax error: there's no comma to terminate the title field. – Mico Nov 14 '16 at 21:03
  • @Mico "it does not work" meaning that the citations still do not appear and gives the same error message. The bibliography style I used was
    \bibliographystyle{apalike}

    nbsreport.cls is not available online as it was created by a lecturer.

    – Nessa Nguyen Nov 14 '16 at 21:11
  • 1
    @NessaNguyen have you checked Question mark or bold citation key instead of citation number. What happens if you add in \bibliographystyle{unsrtnat} say to your main text file. If it's not to do wih running the latex bibtex latex latex sequence then it might be something in nbsreport.cls causing the problem. Incidentally which editor are you using? – Dai Bowen Nov 14 '16 at 21:33
  • @DaiBowen the problem still persists when the bibliography style is changed to \bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}. The editor I am using is TexStudio – Nessa Nguyen Nov 14 '16 at 21:38
  • @NessaNguyen you're not being explicitly clear - are you running pdflatex, then bibtex, then pdflatex twice. Try compiling then hitting F11 and compiling a few more times (F11 shold be the shortcut for running bibtex with texstudio). – Dai Bowen Nov 14 '16 at 21:47
  • @DaiBowen Yes, I am running pdflatex, then bibtex, then pdflatex twice – Nessa Nguyen Nov 14 '16 at 22:53
  • Ok, I don't think there's anything obvious, from your comment to Mico's answer it seems to be that the problem presents itself with nbsreport and not with article so it may not be possible to offer any help without access to nbsreport. – Dai Bowen Nov 14 '16 at 22:57
  • @Mico Yeah, it seems like it. Thanks anyway! – Nessa Nguyen Nov 14 '16 at 22:59

1 Answers1

1

In the following example, I'll use the article document class rather than the (proprietary?) nbsreport class you appear to be using. As you will see, the code does compile correctly when using the article class; if it does not compile when switching to the elusive nbsreport class, it just may be the case that the latter class suffers from one or more bugs.

The apalike bibliography style is one of the most ancient bibliography styles out there. As such, it is not programmed to recognize, let alone process, fields such as urldate. You should also encase URL strings in \url directives in order to let LaTeX find (more) suitable line break possibilities, if needed. Do also fix up syntax errors such as missing commas. Plus, do encase instances of "UAE" occurring in the title fields in curly braces so that they don't get converted to lower-case.

enter image description here

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{nbsrep.bib}
@misc{blackboard2016,
author = "Blackboard",
title = "Blackboard Collaborate",
note ="\url{http://www.blackboard.com/online-collaborative-learning/blackboard-collaborate.aspx}, last checked on 2016-10-28",
year = "2016"
}
@misc{clarke2016,
author = "Lauren Clarke",
organization = "Concrete",
title = "Is the {UEA} campus becoming unrecognisable?--- concrete",
note = "\url{http://www.concrete-online.co.uk/uea-campus-unrecognisable/}, last checked on 2016-10-27",
year = "2016",
month = "June",
day = "14"
}
@misc{frankkeyes2015,
author = "Jessica Frank-Keyes",
organization = "Concrete",
title = "{UEA} plans to recruit 20\% more students by 2030---concrete",
url = "\url{http://www.concrete-online.co.uk/uea-plans-to-recruit-20-more-students-by-2030/}, last checked on 2016-10-27",
year = "2015",
month = "November",
day = "30"
}
@misc{uea2016,
author = "UEA",
title = "Archived annual facts and figures booklets",
note = "\url{https://portal.uea.ac.uk/planningoffice/biu/planning-and-management/facts-and-figures}, last checked on 2016-10-27",
year = "2016"
}
\end{filecontents}

\documentclass[final]{article} % I don't have access to 'nbsreport'
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\usepackage[hyphens]{url}
\usepackage[colorlinks,allcolors=blue]{hyperref} % choose your preferred color(s)

\begin{document}
\citep{uea2016, frankkeyes2015}

\citep{clarke2016}

\citep{blackboard2016}

\bibliography{nbsrep}
\end{document}
Mico
  • 506,678
  • Thank you, I have tried to create a new tex file with your example and everything appears as it should do with citations shown. However when I used the article with the report tex file I am working on, the citations do not appear and still have the error message of not having a BBL file. It must be something within the actual tex file, which I shall have to go through. Thanks again! – Nessa Nguyen Nov 14 '16 at 22:47