How to Add Citations and a Bibliography in LaTeX

To cite in LaTeX, store your references in a .bib file and reference them by key with \cite{key}. Load BibLaTeX, point it at the file with \addbibresource{refs.bib}, and print the formatted list with \printbibliography. LaTeX numbers, sorts, and styles every entry automatically — you never format a reference by hand.

1. Create the .bib database

A .bib file holds one entry per source. Each entry has a type (@article, @book, @inproceedings), a unique key, and fields.

% refs.bib
@inproceedings{vaswani2017,
  author    = {Vaswani, Ashish and others},
  title     = {Attention Is All You Need},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2017}
}

@book{knuth1984,
  author    = {Knuth, Donald E.},
  title     = {The {\TeX}book},
  publisher = {Addison-Wesley},
  year      = {1984}
}

The key (vaswani2017) is how you cite. Keep keys consistent — authorYEAR is the common convention.

2. Cite with BibLaTeX (recommended)

BibLaTeX is the modern engine. It uses the biber backend, supports Unicode, and offers dozens of styles.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=ieee, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{refs.bib}

\begin{document}
The Transformer architecture~\parencite{vaswani2017} reshaped NLP.
Knuth~\textcite{knuth1984} designed \TeX{} for typesetting.

\printbibliography
\end{document}

\parencite gives a parenthetical citation; \textcite puts the author in the sentence. Only sources you actually cite appear in the list — add \nocite{*} to force every entry in.

3. Or use classic BibTeX with natbib

Many older journal templates still ship BibTeX. The equivalent commands come from natbib.

| Task | BibLaTeX | BibTeX + natbib | |---|---|---| | Engine to run | biber | bibtex | | Parenthetical | \parencite{k} | \citep{k} | | In-text author | \textcite{k} | \citet{k} | | Print list | \printbibliography | \bibliography{refs} | | Set style | style= option | \bibliographystyle{} |

For the full trade-off, read BibTeX vs BibLaTeX.

4. The compile sequence (why citations break)

References resolve in a multi-pass build. The first pdflatex records which keys you cited; biber (or bibtex) reads the .bib and builds the list; the next two passes insert the numbers and fix cross-references. Skip a pass and every citation shows [?]. LetX runs the full sequence on every save, so you see resolved citations instantly instead of debugging a four-command build by hand.

5. Get references without typing them

Don't hand-type entries. Export BibTeX from Google Scholar (the quote icon → BibTeX), Zotero, or your journal's website. See Manage References With LetX: Zotero → Bibliography for a clean import workflow.

→ Manage citations live in LetX. Building a full paper? See How to Write a Research Paper in LaTeX.

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Written by Shihab Shahriar Antor — AI Engineer & Founder of Shahriar Labs, maker of LetX.