How to comment references in a bibliography

Question

I hope i'm in the right place to ask you my question! I've already gone through many posts but I can't find a solution to my problem.

I'm currently writing a case study and i've been asked to comment my references/sources.

In other words, I need to explain why I chose to use every single source in my bibliography.

So, I was hoping it was possible with bibtex to write the reference, then write a few sentences to describe it.

Example:

[1] Doe, J. The Title. The Journal.
This source is really interesting because it doesn't have a real title. 
[2] Another Doe, J. The new Title. The Same Journal.
This second source is also really interesting because it contains words.    

I can't find a way to do it, anybody got a solution?

Thanks everybody :)

Are you willing to use the biblatex and biber and add the comments as a field in the bib file? — StrongBad, Dec 11 '13 at 20:39
Well, it depends on what changes I need to make. I'm already using the multibib package. On the other hand, i'm using Texstudio on a Mac and i think it's possible to change quite easily, but i've never tried biblatex before, so I can't be sure. — user3092726, Dec 11 '13 at 20:42
If you are willing to use biblatex then the answers to this question are probably useful: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/91304/how-to-move-the-note-field-out-and-away-from-the-main-reference-using-biblatex — StrongBad, Dec 12 '13 at 11:03
Perhaps this question will help: What is the most convenient way to create annotated bibliographies, e.g. in a literature review? — Alan Munn, Dec 12 '13 at 16:24

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 12 '13 at 10:24

With biblatex and biber and modifications to you bib file, it is quite easy to get pretty close to what you are asking for. The problem is that the biblatex trad-plain style does not match you style perfectly: the sort order and ordering of the author name parts are different along with capitalization of the titles and journal name and some italics. This can all be fixed if it is really needed. The key thing is that your comments needs to be stored for every entry as a field mynote. We then need to tell biber about the new field

\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field,datatype=literal]{mynote}

and then we need to tell biblatex to print the field after every entry

\xapptobibmacro{finentry}{\par\printfield{mynote}}{}{}

where the \xapptobibmacro macro comes from the xpatch package. A complete MWE that uses the filecontents environment to create a dummy bib file:

\documentclass{article}

% This just makes a dummy bib file
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@ARTICLE{a,
   author = {Doe, J.},
   title = {The Title},
   journal = {The Journal},
   mynote = {This source is really interesting because it doesn't have a real title}
}

@ARTICLE{b,
   author = {Smith, J.},
   title = {The New Title},
   journal = {The Same Journal},
   mynote = {This second source is also really interesting because it contains words}
}
\end{filecontents}

% This does the work
\usepackage[style=trad-plain]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field,datatype=literal]{mynote}

\usepackage{xpatch}
\xapptobibmacro{finentry}{\par\printfield{mynote}}{}{}

\begin{document}
\nocite{*}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

output

Thanks a lot!! It took me a while to make it work because I'm using a multibib, but it does the trick! :) Thanks again!!! — user3092726, Dec 13 '13 at 15:40
For future reference, please note that this doesn't work any more with biblatex. It isn't possible any more to include \DeclareDatamodelFields commands in the preamble. See here for a workaround: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/238554/help-with-annotated-bibliography-in-biblatex?noredirect=1#comment566230_238554 — NVaughan, Apr 14 '15 at 16:33

How to comment references in a bibliography

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