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I am using Latex to write approx. 60-pages long academic report. In my first draft, I had around 90 references but my reviewer (professor) told me to use fewer references. Hence, I have deleted citations inside the paper but now the problem is how to effectively delete uncited papers from the bibliography? I could go one by one a delete but it would take me ages. I was thinking of a way to highlight only cited pages in the bibliography so that I can delete the highlighted ones. Is there any such method? Here is my excerpt of latex code

\documentclass[12pt,fleqn,bibliography=totoc]{book}
 % list of packages
 \begin{document}
  \chapter{chapter 1}
  ... it has been shown by \cite{Ait-sahalia}..
 \begin{thebibliography}{}
 \bibitem{Ait-sahalia} Y. A\"{i}t-Sahalia. XXX
 \bibitem{Ait-sahaliaa}  Y. A\"{i}t-Sahalia. YY.
 \bibitem{Akaike} H. Akaike. ZZ.
 %some more items
 \end{thebibliography}

 \end{document}

It would be great to highlight the reference item corresponding to Ait-sahalia or if there is automatic way to delete, it would safe my life. Thank you in advance.

stochastic learner
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    Using .bib files and bibtex or biber is the best way to compile bibliographies. It provides more options to you. – Tanvir May 31 '20 at 01:14
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    Is the deadline for submitting the thesis too close for you to learn how to use a software tool such as bibtex or biblatex? Augmenting your human capital in this way would generate significant positive returns in the long run. – Mico May 31 '20 at 03:58

1 Answers1

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Best approach

As commented, it is the use of .bib database files using bibtex or biblatex. With these approaches, the reference appear in the bibliography chapter automatically only when cited in some way (including the hidden citation of \nocite{key}, or even \nocite{*} to include all the references of the database).

Please see this quick comparison of the bibtex and biblatexmethods with what you are using here.

Quick approach

As make a big BibTeX database is not trivial, even if you know how to do it, in your actual document an easy way to check what references are already cited could be add back-references to the citation pages with the hyperref package.

In the next example, you can see that only the second reference (key-2) is not cited in any page of the document, checking only the references section:

\documentclass[english]{article}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[backref=page]{hyperref}
\begin{document}

Foo foo foo \cite{key-1}  

\newpage\newpage\newpage 
Bah Bah Bah \cite{key-3}. 

\begin{thebibliography}{aaa}
    \bibitem[aaa]{key-1} Foo.\par
    \bibitem[bbb]{key-2} Bah.\par
    \bibitem[ccc]{key-3} Baz.\par 
\end{thebibliography}

\end{document}

MWE

Therefore, you can safely remove (or comment) this \bibitem, then add the colorlinks option of hyperref to avoid the awful color boxes, then remove the backref=page (of course, only if you do not want the back links), and now you go it.

Fran
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