How do I correctly add bibtex to my project?

Question

So I am writing my first article with Latex and I've got 20 pages so far. I did copy all my references so I could just input them at the end. While starting inserting my references, I found out that there is a way to just copy some bibtex reference and generate a customized reference page. I started reading some guides and following some tutorials but i always ended up having "no reference to citation". I don't know if I missed something out in my project or just horribly failed at some point but I just try to describe my project to you:

I have every chapter split into different files sorted into different folders. I have folder "chapter_1" - "chapter_6". Inside every folder are .tex files and pictures. My first page and table of contents are in the same directory as the main.tex.

So first of I created a file called "reference.bib" and put 1 reference inside to test this out. I went into my main.tex and added

\usepackage[backend=biber]{bibtex}
\addbibresource{reference.bib}

to my preamble. Then I went to the point i want the reference page to be printed and inserted a \printbibliography{reference.bib}. Lastly I went to the part I wanted to cite and put a \cite{1234} (the corresponding number) in the text. Compiling always gave me no references and errors. I did it the exact same way most other did this and I don't know what to do at this point.

If the description is not detailed enough just let me know, i'd go ahead and share most of the code I wrote.

Answer 1

Welcome to TeX.SX!@marcopasta

There are at least 3 ways to use bibliography in LaTeX related software:

1. Use BibTeX:

   \documentclass{article}
   \usepackage{natbib}
   \begin{document}
    This is a citation~\citep{SomeOne}
   This is a citation about \citet{SomeOther} that \ldots
   \bibliographystyle{apalike}
   \bibliography{MyBibFile}
   \end{document}
   

2. Use biblatex (actually biber):

   \documentclass{article}
   \usepackage[style=apa,natbib=true]{biblatex} 
   \addbibresource{MyBibFile.bib} 
   \begin{document}
   This is a citation~\citep{SomeOne}
   This is a citation about \citet{SomeOther} that \ldots
   \printbibliography
   \end{document}
   

3. Manually added bibliography

The \begin{bibliography} and \end{bibliography} where you are placing \bibitems manually

In your question you just combined the two first methods in a wrong way (they are not combine-able anyway)