If you use the BibTeX program by Oren Patashnik (highly recommended if
you need a bibliography of more than a couple of titles) to maintain
your bibliography, you don't use the thebibliography
environment. Instead, you include the lines
\bibliographystyle{style}
\bibliography{bibfile}
where style refers to a file style.bst, which defines how
your citations will look. The standard styles distributed with BibTeX
are:
alpha
|
Sorted alphabetically. Labels are formed from name of author and year of publication. |
plain
|
Sorted alphabetically. Labels are numeric. |
unsrt
|
Like plain, but entries are in order of citation.
|
abbrv
|
Like plain, but more compact labels.
|
In addition, numerous other BibTeX style files exist tailored to the demands of various publications.
The argument to \bibliography refers to the file
bibfile.bib, which should contain your database in BibTeX
format. Only the entries referred to via \cite and \nocite
will be listed in the bibliography.