References to align with the rest of the text

Question

I'm using LaTeX2e and don't want the abbreviations that appear in my text (at \cite) to appear also in the left margin of the bibliography, so have:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}\usepackage{rotating}
\usepackage{amsmath}
%...
\makeatletter
%...
\def\@biblabel#1{}
%...
\makeatother
%...
\begin{document}
%...
\begin{thebibliography}{}
\bibitem[Aitken 1935]{Aitken}Aitken AC (1935): Note on selection from a multivariate normal population. \emph{Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society}, 4:106--110.
%...
\end{thebibliography}
%...
\end{document}

The problem is that the bibliography items are indented slightly more than the rest of the article text:

I want them indented the same as the article text. How do I get the references over to the left?

(Note: I don't want to use BibTeX, as (a) using it for this is overkill (especially since I don't plan to use these references in future papers) and (b) it's another thing I'd have to learn.)

Answer 1

You can redefine the thebibliography environment, as defined in article.cls, to suppress the additional space; in the following example I show the redefinition (it consists in commenting out the line \advance\leftmargin\labelsep):

\documentclass{article}

\makeatletter
\def\@biblabel#1{}
\renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]
     {\section*{\refname}%
      \@mkboth{\MakeUppercase\refname}{\MakeUppercase\refname}%
      \list{\@biblabel{\@arabic\c@enumiv}}%
           {\settowidth\labelwidth{\@biblabel{#1}}%
            \leftmargin\labelwidth
            %\advance\leftmargin\labelsep
            \@openbib@code
            \usecounter{enumiv}%
            \let\p@enumiv\@empty
            \renewcommand\theenumiv{\@arabic\c@enumiv}}%
      \sloppy
      \clubpenalty4000
      \@clubpenalty \clubpenalty
      \widowpenalty4000%
      \sfcode`\.\@m}
     {\def\@noitemerr
       {\@latex@warning{Empty `thebibliography' environment}}%
      \endlist}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{thebibliography}{}
\bibitem[Aitken 1935]{Aitken}Aitken AC (1935): Note on selection from a multivariate normal population. \emph{Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society}, 4:106--110.
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}

Using the etoolbox package, this redefinition can be done in a shorter way:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{etoolbox}

\makeatletter
\def\@biblabel#1{}
\makeatother
\patchcmd{\thebibliography}{\advance\leftmargin\labelsep}{}{}{}

\begin{document}

\begin{thebibliography}{}
\bibitem[Aitken 1935]{Aitken}Aitken AC (1935): Note on selection from a multivariate normal population. \emph{Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society}, 4:106--110.
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}