Putting bibliography entries in text

This is a common requirement for journals and other publications in the humanities. Sometimes the requirement is for the entry to appear in the running text of the document, while other styles require that the entry appear in a footnote.

Options for entries in running text are

• The package bibentry, which puts slight restrictions on the format of entry that your bst file generates, but is otherwise undemanding of the bibliography style.
• The package inlinebib, which requires that you use its inlinebib.bst. Inlinebib was actually designed for footnote citations: its expected use is that you place a citation inline as the argument of a \footnote command.
• The package jurabib, which was originally designed for German law documents, and has comprehensive facilities for the manipulation of citations. The package comes with four bibliography styles that you may use: jurabib.bst, jhuman.bst and two Chicago-like ones.

Options for entries in footnotes are

• The package footbib, and
• Packages jurabib and inlinebib, again.

Note that jurabib does the job using LaTeX’s standard footnotes, whereas footbib creates its own sequence of footnotes. Therefore, in a document which has other footnotes, it may be advisable to use jurabib (or of course inlinebib), to avoid confusion of footnotes and foot-citations.

The usebib package offers a “toolbox”, which allows the user to place exactly what is needed, in the text (that is, rather than a full citation). The package’s command, that does the actual typesetting, is \usebibdata{<key>}{<field>}; it typesets the field item from the entry key in the bibliography; the user then formats the entry as desired — obviously one could construct one’s own bibliography, altogether, from this command, but it would quickly become tedious.

FAQ ID: Q-bibinline
Tags: citations