Manually input bibliography

Question

I'm currently using Overleaf to write my dissertation and I'm trying to upload my bibliography. I'm new to Overleaf/LaTeX, so I was unaware that I would need to code my in-text citations so that they would sync with the bibliography citations. I have about 300 pages of work and I REALLY don't want to go back and change ALL of the in-text citations, but without this coding my bibliography at the end is basically blank. Is there any way that I can manually input a bibliography at the end--so basically it's just more text at the end that isn't synced with the in-text citations? I know it's not ideal, so other options are greatly appreciated as well.

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Given the comments, I take it that your problem is the following:

1. You have a thesis written in LaTeX
2. You have a manually created and formatted bibliography in Word.
3. Your citation callouts are simply written into your source document without using any bibliography package.

Given this situation you have two main options, the choice of which depends on your time constraints, and how much forward compatibility you need with respect to your bibliography. (i.e., will you need it again, or will it exist only for your thesis?)

Option 1: Create a .bib file

If you have time, and you envision needing the bibliography for future documents, then it would be well worth the time to create a proper .bib file out of your Word document. There are online tools to help ease this process. It's by no means completely automatic, so you will likely need to do some manual cleanup of the resulting file, but it certainly will save you from entering everything manually.

• How do I convert a Word file's references to .bib format

Once you've created this file you will need to find a bibliography style that matches your university requirements. I would recommend starting with one of the biblatex styles and working from there, since they are generally easier to modify, especially when there are odd requirements. Once you have decided this, you have two options with your in text citations:

1. Convert all your hard coded in text citation callouts to proper \cite{...} commands for the relevant bibliography package, and create your bibliography in an automated way.
2. Don't fix any of your hard coded citation callouts, and simply use \nocite{*} to include your entire .bib file as the bibliography.

So schematically your thesis would then look like the following:

\documentclass{book} % or whatever class you are using
\usepackage[style=ext-authoryear]{biblatex} % an easily modifiable author-year style
\addbibresource{mybibfile.bib} % name of your bibliography file
\begin{document}
\chapter{A chapter}
This is some research that I read (Dewey, Cheetham and Howe, 2021). As Smith (1993) showed. 
% add all of the contents of the .bib file to the bibliography without callouts
\nocite{*} 
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Your .bib file should obviously contain only those references that you have actually cited in the thesis in your manually written callouts. So in this example, the .bib file would contain only the entries for Smith1993 and DeweyCheethamHowe2021.

Option 2: Create a totally manual bibliography

The second option is to simply create a completely hard coded bibliography. To do this you could use pandoc to convert your Word bibliography into a .tex file, and then using the hanging package, input the resultant .tex file in the hangparas environment (since bibliographies typically have a hanging indent). This is the really quick and dirty solution, and would work if you didn't really care about the long term future of your bibliography, or you are so short on time, you can't implement Option 1. Unfortunately I don't think you can run pandoc on Overleaf, so this solution would require a proper TeX distribution on your computer plus pandoc. As a concrete example, here is a small LaTeX document I created simply by using the following pandoc command:

pandoc wordbib.docx -o wordbib.tex

and then adding the appropriate preamble code.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hanging}
\begin{document}
\section{References}
\begin{hangparas}{.25in}{1}
Abels, Klaus (2002) `Successive cyclicity, anti-locality and adposition
stranding.' PhD dissertation University of Connecticut.
Hornstein, Norbert & Amy Weinberg (1981) `Case theory and preposition
stranding.' \emph{Linguistic Inquiry} 12, 55--91.
Kampen, Jacqueline van (1996) `PF/LF convergence in acquisition.' In K.
Kusumoto (ed.) \emph{Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society}
(NELS) 26, 149 - 163. University of Mass., Amherst: GLSA.
\end{hangparas}
\end{document}

In your use case, you would create this file, add the hanging package to your preamble, wrap the converted references in the hangparas environment and then use \input{wordbib} in your main document after an appropriate chapter/section heading.