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I am using TexPad as editor and I do the latex, bibtex, latex, latex compilation. The weird thing is that I have two citations that show up and two that come as question marks, I am really puzzled about what the problem is and would appreciate help very much.

This is my tex code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{plain}
\begin{document}

xx\cite{Yu}
\cite{doiX}
\cite{labinger}
\cite{ab}
\bibliography{references}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\end{document}

and my .bib file:

@article{doiX,
   author = "He Hao and Ling-Yan Chen and Wai-Yeung  Wong and 
             Wing-Hong  Chan and Albert W. M.  Lee",
   title  = "Practical Synthetic Approach to Chiral Sulfonimides (CSIs) 
             Brnsted Acids for Organocatalysis",
} 

@book{Yu,
   series = {Topics in current chemistry},
   volume = {292},
   publisher = {Springer},
   isbn = {978-3-642-12355-9},
   year = {2010},
   title = {C-H Activation},
   language = {eng},
   address = {Heidelberg},
   author = {Yu, Jin-Quan and Ackermann, xL},
   keywords = {ORGANISCHE SYNTHESE (CHEMIE): 547.057{,
}

@article{labinger,
   title  = {Understanding and exploiting C-H bond activation},
   author = {hallo},
   journal= {Nature},
   volume = {417},
   number = {6888},
   pages  = {507},
   year   = {2002},
   publisher={Nature Publishing Group}
}

@article{ab,
   author = "He Haond Ling-Yan Chen and Wai-Yeung  Wong and  
             Wing-Hong  Chan and Albert W. M.  Lee",
   title  = "Practical Synthetic Approach to Chiral Sulfonimides 
             (CSIs)  Brnsted Acids for Organocatalysis",
}

and this is what the output looks like:

enter image description here

The error in the log says: 

LaTeX Warning: Citation `ab' on page 1 undefined on input line 8.

(./BiBTexTest.bbl) [1{/usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap
/pdftex.map}] (./BiBTexTest.aux)

LaTeX Warning: There were undefined references.
Mico
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Seraphine
  • 11
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    Welcome to TeX.SX. You have to run an extra program called BibTeX. Please have a look at https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/63852/question-mark-or-bold-citation-key-instead-of-citation-number – Johannes_B Jul 01 '18 at 06:29
  • Incidentally, why do you load the plain package? AFAICT, it's meant to be used for users who wish to enter plain-TeX commands in LaTeX document. Is that the case in your document? – Mico Jul 01 '18 at 07:01

1 Answers1

2

When you ran BibTeX on the above bibliographic entries, you must have gotten a fatal-error message about the entry with key Yu, because that entry contains the following faulty keywords field:

keywords = {ORGANISCHE SYNTHESE (CHEMIE): 547.057{,

The second instance of { must surely be }. Once you make the called-for correction, the four entries can be compiled.

By the way, "can be compiled" does not imply that the contents of the bibliographic entries are correct. For instance, the entries with keys ab and doiX are missing the required journal and year fields. Moreover, the ab entry has the following, rather dubious, author field:

author = "He Haond Ling-Yan Chen and Wai-Yeung Wong ..."

This must surely be 

author = "He, Hao and Ling-Yan Chen and Wai-Yeung Wong ..."

With Chinese names, be extra careful to identify what are the first or given name components and what are the last or family name components.

Next, Brnsted is incorrect; please change both instances of Brnsted to Br{\o}nsted. Incidentally, the author "hallo" [!!] in the labinger entry has got to be wrong.

And, I doubt that the Ackermann item in the author field of the Yu entry is correct. I think you should replace 

author = {Yu, Jin-Quan and Ackermann, xL},

with 

editor = {Yu, Jin-Quan and Shi, Zhangjie},

That book contains 12 chapters authored by various contributors. (One of the chapters, in fact, was co-authored by L. Ackermann and R. Vicente!) Are you really citing the entire book? Or did you mean to cite a specific chapter from that book? If so, you should be using an entry of type @incollection, so that you can provide information about the authors, the title of the chapter, and possibly the number of the chapter and the page range in addition to the editor and booktitle fields.

Finally, don't forget to encase certain uppercase-letter strings, such as CSIs, C-H and (yes!) Br{\o}nsted, in curly braces so that BibTeX doesn't convert them to all-lowercase.

Mico
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