107

My problem is that I have only one reference. So I would like the head of this part to appear "Reference" instead of commonly "References". More generally, could we change the title "References" to an arbitrary name?

Thank you very much for your help!

diabonas
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Anand
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9 Answers9

127

It depends on the documentclass.

\renewcommand\bibname{Reference}

works for some.

As chl points out. Others use \refname instead of \bibname.

TH.
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    (+1) Ah, we posted quite at the same time, but you the first :-) I just suggested in addition to replace \refname by \bibname for a book. Feel free to add it to your answer if you like. – chl May 05 '11 at 08:31
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    To change ShareLatex name use \renewcommand\refname{Reference}. – Fernando Paladini Oct 27 '16 at 02:11
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    You can pretty much tell whether you need refname or bibname by whether the current name is references or bibliography, respectively :-) – Joanna Bryson Jul 06 '18 at 11:04
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    @JoannaBryson That's a good heuristic but sadly isn't always true. (It works for the standard document classes but a case-insensitive grep for refname.*biblio and bibname.*reference in my texmf-dist/tex/latex directory show a handful that don't follow that convention. Mainly dissertation formats, it seems.) – TH. Jul 31 '18 at 08:27
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    To my experience, some packages like babel may interfere with this command. – Shawyan Azdam Jan 02 '19 at 20:44
  • \renewcommand\refname worked for me. Using this in OverLeaf. – aghost Aug 12 '19 at 15:40
51

In my case, I added the following option to \printbibliography:

\printbibliography[title={Reference}]

For more details, see the BibLaTeX documentation, section 3.7.2 The Bibliography.

pgonzalezalv
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32

It seems \refname works fine for me while \bibname not.

For TOC, in case you need it, use \contentsname

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}
\renewcommand{\contentsname}{whatever}
\renewcommand{\refname}{whatever}
mafp
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Catalin
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  • Welcome to TeX.SE! To make your answer more usable for others, it would very much help if you indicated which document class you use. (Some document classes use the macro \bibname, while others use \refname.) – Mico Jun 29 '14 at 10:45
  • You can pretty much tell whether you need refname or bibname by whether the current name is references or bibliography, respectively :-) – Joanna Bryson Jul 06 '18 at 11:04
13

In my case, I needed to add the following lines:

\usepackage[english,portuguese]{babel}
\addto\captionsportuguese{\renewcommand{\figurename}{Fig.}}
\addto\captionsportuguese{\renewcommand{\refname}{Reference}}
\renewcommand{\figurename}{Fig.}
\renewcommand{\refname}{Reference}

I hope this helps to complete this topic.

Sigur
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Lucas_Jardim
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    Welcome. When you type some code you can select it and press ctrl+k to format as code. – Sigur May 09 '15 at 16:22
  • Thank you. This helped me too! In my case I had to replace portuguese with german. :) – ryu Oct 14 '20 at 20:55
10

Renew the \bibsection-command. For example:

\renewcommand{\bibsection}{\subsection*{Reference, typeset as un-numbered subsection.}}

(Credits to http://latex.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4089, where I found the solution which worked for me.)

Golar Ramblar
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5

For cyrillic OT1 I found out this solution. hope it'll help. add this to preamble: \addto\captionsrussian{\def\refname{Список литературы}}

Bluesboy
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4

What worked for me is an un-numbered chapter:

\renewcommand{\bibsection}{\chapter*{Publications and presentations}}
Sigur
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rvaneijk
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1

Expanding on Lucas Jardim's solution, the most voted solution doesn't work when using babel package as this package overwrites any \refname or \bibname configurations.

In order to get it working you just have to change it after importing babel package:

\usepackage[$LANGUAGE]{babel}
\addto\captions$LANGUAGE{\renewcommand{\refname}{$NEWREFNAME}}
%     \extras$LANGUAGE                 \bibname

where:

  • $LANGUAGE is the language you want to use it for
  • $NEWREFNAME is the new reference name you want to set

The alternatives (extras instead of captions and \bibname instead of \refname) were written in the comment if the code doesn't work.

Example for Polish language:

Where $LANGUAGE = polish and $NEWREFNAME = Źródła:

\usepackage[polish]{babel}
\addto\captionspolish{\renewcommand{\refname}{Źródła}}
satk0
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-1
\renewcommand\bibname{Reference}


make sure to write this line at the beginning after you define your document class if you wanna change the default bibliography name to "Reference":
For example: 
\documentclass[12pt]{report}

\renewcommand\bibname{Reference}


\begin{document}

...
nirojshrestha019
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