Library tutorial for physics master students

 

 

 

Exercise 4: Bonus exercise – using a reference manager with latex

Only do this exercise if you are not familiar with using a reference manager with latex. Do this exercise individually, but ask your peers (or a teacher) for help if you need to. If you didn't bring your laptop, you may either try to use a service such as overleaf, or do this exercise some other time.

There are two absolute requirements on references:

  1. Enough information to find the document being referred to
  2. Consistent styling
Keeping track of your references is simpler with a reference management software. Mendeley, Zotero and EndNote are commonly used. All of them support bibtex export (for latex) and have plugins for use with Microsoft Word. These programs both act as a library keeping track of all the documents you have added there, and they help you creating flawless reference lists.

a) Install a reference manager (e.g. Mendeley or Zotero). Toss a coin if you don't know which to choose.

b) Drop a couple of article pdfs into your reference manager. Export biblatex citations to a .bib file.

c) The following is a minimal example of a latex document using biblatex. 

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\usepackage[style=nature, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} 
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\addbibresource{bibliography.bib}

\begin{document}

This is a citation \cite{some_author2019}. 

\printbibliography

\end{document}

Use this example with your exported .bib file to create a nicely formatted reference list.