-1

How to make reference numbers which appear in Reference section in bold text without any change in citation text? When we cite it should look like [1] [2]. But in the reference section it should be bold.

Reference:

[1] .........

[2] ..........

My bibliography style is plain. I was trying to change plain.bst file but I have not found plain.bst in ubuntu.

msingh
  • 1
  • Anyway, biblatex does not use .bst files, but its own .bbx files. So why do you use the biblatex tag? – Bernard Aug 01 '20 at 07:50
  • The formatting of the numbers in the bibliography is controlled by your document class and possibly by a bibliography-related package you load. It would help us to help you if you could share with us a short example document that demonstrates your bibliography setup (a so-called MWE https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/228/35864 or MWEB https://tex.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4407/35864) – moewe Aug 01 '20 at 10:30

1 Answers1

1

Theoretically the presentation of the citation label in the bibliography is up to the document class you use and can additionally be modified by bibliography-related packages. So it is not possible to say with absolute certainty what you should do.

The following works for most standard setups. In the standard classes the citation label in the bibliography is typeset using the \@biblabel command. It is defiend as \def\@biblabel#1{[#1]} and it is straightforward to add \textbf to make it read

\documentclass{article}

\makeatletter
\renewcommand*{@biblabel}[1]{\textbf{[#1]}}
\makeatother


\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@book{appleby,
  author    = {Humphrey Appleby},
  title     = {On the Importance of the Civil Service},
  year      = {1980},
  publisher = {Pub & Co.},
}
\end{filecontents}


\begin{document}
\cite{appleby}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{\jobname}
\end{document}

Remember that you need \makeatletter...\makeatother because the macro name contains an @ to mark it as internal. See also What do \makeatletter and \makeatother do?.

Bold citation label

moewe
  • 175,683
  • It has worked, Thank You – msingh Aug 02 '20 at 04:43
  • @msingh If the answer helped you, please consider accepting it by clicking on the checkmark on the top left. See https://tex.stackexchange.com/help/someone-answers. – moewe Aug 02 '20 at 04:55