How do I reduce the size of the word "References" in the bibliography section?

Question

I'm using \begin{thebibiliography} to generate a bibliography at the end of the page. The heading for this is "References" and I would like to reduce the size of this heading. I'm using the article document class.

Answer 1

The simplest way to go is the light usage of titlesec. As in the article class, the bibliography is a \section, which by default is in \Large size, you can add this to your preamble:

\usepackage{titlesec}
\titleformat*{\section}{\bfseries\large}