BibTeX Documentation

BibTeX, a program originally designed to produce bibliographies in conjunction with LaTeX, is explained in Section 4.3 and Appendix B of Leslie Lamport’s LaTeX manual. The document “BibTeXing”, contained in the file btxdoc.tex, expands on the chapter in Lamport’s book. The LaTeX Companion also has information on BibTeX and writing BibTeX style files. (See TeX-related books for details of both books.)

The document “Designing BibTeX Styles”, contained in the file btxhak.tex, explains the postfix stack-based language used to write BibTeX styles (.bst files). The file btxbst.doc is the template for the four standard styles (plain, abbrv, alpha, and unsrt). It also contains their documentation. The complete BibTeX documentation set (including all the files above) is available on CTAN.

A useful tutorial of the whole process of using BibTeX is Nicolas Markey’s “Tame the BeaST (The B to X of BibTeX)”, which may also be found on CTAN. A summary and FAQ (btxFAQ), by Michael Shell and David Hoadley, is also to be recommended.

BibTeX documentation
biblio/bibtex/contrib/doc (or browse the directory)
btxFAQ.pdf
biblio/bibtex/contrib/doc/btxFAQ.pdf
Tame the BeaST
info/bibtex/tamethebeast/ttb_en.pdf

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=BibTeXing