LaTeX: Bibliography, Compilation & Tooling

Bibliography with BibTeX

% references.bib -- structured citation data, stored once
@book{knuth1984texbook,
  author = {Donald E. Knuth},
  title  = {The TeXbook},
  year   = {1984},
  publisher = {Addison-Wesley}
}

% In the document
As described in \cite{knuth1984texbook}...

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\bibliography{references}

% \cite{} auto-generates the correctly formatted in-text citation
% AND bibliography entry, in whatever style is chosen -- change
% the style once (plain, ieee, apalike, ...), every citation
% updates consistently.

Why Multiple Compilation Passes

# A single pass processes top-to-bottom -- a \ref{} to something
# defined LATER, or a \cite{} resolved via BibTeX, needs a
# subsequent pass reading the .aux/.bbl files the previous pass wrote
pdflatex paper.tex
bibtex paper
pdflatex paper.tex
pdflatex paper.tex

# latexmk automates this whole sequence, re-running only as many
# times as actually needed
latexmk -pdf paper.tex

Distributions & Cloud Editors

• TeX Live / MiKTeX: local distributions bundling the compiler engines, CTAN packages, and fonts -- required to compile .tex locally.

• Overleaf: cloud-based, compiles server-side (no local install needed), real-time collaborative editing -- common for co-authored papers.

• Plain-text .tex source works well with git -- meaningful line-level diffs and mergeable concurrent edits, unlike opaque binary document formats.

Document Classes

• article: shorter documents/papers, no chapter-level structure.

• report / book: chapter-level sectioning, front/back matter -- suited to longer works.

• beamer: repurposes the whole pipeline to produce presentation slides instead of a paper-style document.

When LaTeX Is Worth It

• Strong fit: heavy math, many citations/cross-references, long technical documents needing precise, consistent typography.

• Weaker fit: a short memo or simple letter -- the markup/compile-step learning curve may not be worth it over a familiar word processor.